About

The subject is narrow on purpose. Between roughly the arrival of the Roland TR-808 and the point at which the Yamaha DX7's factory sounds had become unavoidable, a set of instruments and a set of rooms produced a way of making records that had not existed before and has not gone away. This magazine takes that period apart one component at a time.

What an entry is

Every entry is one machine, one room or one technique, and the records that show what it did. An entry on the TR-808 explains how its bass drum is generated and why the decay runs as long as it does. An entry on Townhouse Studio 2 explains what stone and ceiling height contribute that no rack of outboard can supply. The machine, the room and the decision are separable, so they get separate entries and are linked to each other rather than merged.

Where an origin story is contested

Several of the stories in this subject have more than one claimant, and the accounts do not agree. Gated reverb is the clearest case: the version most often told places it at the Townhouse with a compressed reverse-talkback path left open on a kit, and engineers working in other London rooms have described arriving at the same result independently. Both accounts stand. Where that is the situation, the entry says that it is contested and sets out what is actually documented, rather than choosing the version that tells best.

Names are used freely where the record is clear. Dead figures, documented works, real institutions and real places are named specifically, because a piece of writing about recording technique with no proper nouns in it has nothing to attach a photograph or a credit to. Living people are named for documented work only.

The drawing on this site

One device runs through every page: the sixteen-step row, taken from the front panel of a step sequencer. It is the mark beside the masthead, the rule that separates the sections, the small chip that marks a photographic plate, and once, at full size, a drawn front panel with knobs, faders and two rows of steps. Each section also carries its own small drawing — a step pad, a room with a reflection, three faders, two reels, a disc, a waveform, a claim that forks in two.

Photographs are real and credited under each one, in a line quieter than the caption above it. The caption says what the picture cannot; the credit says where it came from.