Hey I’m old enough hehe! Need to check whosampled.com about those Sinead O Connor songs though 
EDIT: Man, you were right… she sampld loads:
EDIT2: Nope, actually it seems like she liked to release mostly cover songs… She didnt sample that much it seems, aside from a Funky Drummer here and a Twin Peaks siundtrack bit there…
Sinead is great. In case you’re only aware of the earlier hits, I highly recommend listening to “Throw Down Your Arms” on which she worked with Sly & Robby.
JJOS’es arent made by Akai. They are ”mods” to the stock OS. I doubt people were using as much JJOS back in the day as they are now that the 1k/2k5 line has been long since discontinued.
And like I said, I only stated things I thought aloud in a broad sense, it was by no means factual or towards a specific individual.
I have read far too many threads about ”legendary MPC SWING! Tight timing!” without the tiniest bit of scientific facts behind it that I am getting jaded, no doubt. Everyone’s always huffin an puffin about it, but aside from some URL’s to innerclock systems website (which only reveal jitter figures), nothing factual ever been said about it other than what Roger Linn himself has said about it.
So obviously I am inclined to lean on the side of Mr Linn, not least because my personal experiences also tell me the same. To my ears, a shuffle is a shuffle, whether its called swing or not, produces the same results. Except for modern equipment, which also does ”negative swing/shuffle” which IMO is even doper than reg shuffle.
yeah the funky drummer is the one that made her famous
Oh man, I just gotta deja vu about this whole thing…
Back then, the OP got mad at me for replying to him. I did not want to be a D then and I dont want to be one now, just so you know…
Isn’t this down to Logic and the Mac being poor at locking on to the signal from the 808? Plus the midi out from the 808 maybe much sloppier than the drums from its internal sequencer.
an original unmodified Roland TR-808 has no MIDI at all…?
96ppqn is a pretty fine degree of resolution. At 120bpm, that means you can nudge beats around in 5ms nudges, that’s pretty sharp.
Well yeah exactly, would depend on how it was modified and how good the tech is, not necessarily the fault of the 808’s internal clock is what I am saying.
Looking on the innerclock tests its max deviation is 2ms, which means that it is only ever out by up to 1ms from where it should be, which is pretty decent. Certainly not sloppy and a tight clock for hardware standards.
…yet people state it has ” timing thing”… 2milliseconds? I am starting to think all this talk about 808/909 groove is just myths being recirculated… Or folks being misled to think that the audio engines are somehow inseparable from the ”groove” which also sounds ignorant to me.
That is another thing than just the clock jitter then. Without indepth knowledge of just how the CPU works in an 808, this might be significant. More info and reseach would be required however…
I’d have to echo what t says here. It’s definitely the sum of all parts with the 808 and 909 that make it sound so unique and not really the timing of the sequencer which is just basically spot on with some slight jitter. 909 shuffle is a different story. There’s some Ableton 909 shuffle groove files floating around that can be had.
I also just want to say that every time this topic pops up I want to invite Neil Degrasse Tyson and get his opinion on it. For science! 
If you say so. 480-960 PPQN does a good job of capturing slop or groove. 96 PPQN is hard quantization all the time as far as I’m concerned.
Wow… ok 
I have those ableton 909 shuffles too… But been wondering if they could be 100% matched with other, Roger Linn -style shuffles. There are like, what, 7 degrees of shuffle on a 909? Covering the more typical range of 50-100?
A vague, propietary shuffle range combined with the esoteric hihat circuitry of the 909 would do quite alot to convince someone of ”magic groove”… Hell that hihat schematic is mad, cant make heads or tails of how it behaves, as in, the resulting response…
Yeah they don’t really sound the same but they get you somewhat close with samples. I was thinking the op could look at those and dissect what he needs and midi up the AR and get a certain vibe going that he’s looking for. With all this talk of magic, when I had a 909 I never used the shuffle, hell most of the time I had it hooked up via midi instead of using the sequencer. I know blasphemy!
yes, they are samples indeed, but the vca & filtering circuitry of the sample playback is rather ”exotic” by modern standards… and yep, both 808 and 606 are fully analog synthesis, and their cymbals and hihats are a superb example of how to get great sounds with as little components as possible…
Yeah I would argue that the clock drift is not insignificant. I’ve written tracks with thousands of tempo changes over 4 or 5 minutes and the sound was way more vintage drum machine sounding than you might expect. In my experience, the clock is most essential, not an extraneous detail.
A tempo change every 300ms?! (5x60/1000=0.3)