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Lollapalooza turns 25 next year, and to celebrate, they've added an extra day to the party. A four-day festival? Sign us up!

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Five San Francisco police officers surrounded then fatally shot on Wednesday a knife-wielding man who did not appear to pose a direct threat to them, in an incident that was captured on eyewitness videos and later confirmed by the San Francisco Police Department.

The video, which was posted by an Instagram user, shows a man staggering and attempting to walk away as police officers move towards him. A female voice in the video can be heard yelling "just drop it!" several seconds before police open fire, shooting what sounds like at least five or six rounds.

See the original Instagram video here. 

Police say the man had been identified as a suspect in a non-fatal stabbing incident less than an hour earlier and that he was holding a six to eight-inch knife. When he refused to respond to initial non-lethal bean bag gun rounds as well as pepper spray, officers opened fire. The shooting took place around 4:30 p.m. local time in the Bayview district. 

A press release from the San Francisco Police Department described the suspect as moving towards the officers while still armed with the knife, and that officers fired at the suspect, "fearing serious injury or death." 

"The suspect had already demonstrated by committing a felony -- aggravated assault -- that he was a danger to others and he could not be allowed to move away from the scene," Police Chief Greg Suhr said at a press conference later that evening.

San Francisco's public defender, Jeff Adachi, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the man did not seem to be posing a direct threat to the officers and that he should not have been shot. 

"It does not look like the officer who fired the fatal shots was in immediate danger of being killed," Adachi told the San Francisco Chronicle. 

The name of the victim, who appears to be African-American, has not been released. The officers involved have been placed on administrative leave while an investigation takes place.

How did the TB-303 bass synthesizer become such a well-known and highly regarded sound in dance music? Today guest contributor Akhil Kalepu goes in-depth with the full history of the Roland TB-303 and how its shortcomings became some of the most sought after sounds in the era of acid house that followed.

Featured Gear: TB-303
Manufacturer: Roland
Date Released: 1982 (production ended 1984)

In a world of software emulations and digital workstation, it’s hard to be impressed by a single oscillator monosynth, but few electronic musical instruments have made an impact as big as the TB-303. Several machines have entered electronic music history as pivotal artifacts of the culture. Released in 1982, Roland’s “Transistor Bass” unit was a sleeper hit that became an iconic piece of electronic music culture, analogous to the Stratocaster for rock and the MPC for hip-hop.

Created by Roland engineer Tadao Kikumoto, the box was largely written off as a failure after just 18 months of production. It was released alongside the TR-606 drum machine as an accompaniment for guitarists, but with unrealistic sounds and a difficult interface the box got little traction upon release. Roland stopped production in 1984, having sold only 10,000 units.

The TB-303’s Quirks

While many of the 303’s early appearances made use of the box’s unconventional nature, the acid house sound did not come together until the late 80s. Due to its commercial failure, there were lots of these bass units available for a low price, making them an attractive buy for bedroom electronic producers.

Producers could choose either a saw or square wave, which is shaped from a saw wave using a single-transistor circuit, giving it a distinctive sound different from typical square waveforms. The TB-303 also has controls for decay, cutoff, resonance and envelope modulation which controls a 4-pole 24dB low-pass filter. All of this comes together with the 303’s notoriously difficult to use sequencer, which allowed users to control accent and portamento for each note. Watch the below video to see someone painstakingly program in Fatboy Slim’s “Everybody Needs A 303”:

Unique circuitry linked accent control to the filter’s cutoff and resonance and kept notes at a fixed slide time which enabled the 303 to create intricate bassline patterns on a single octave keyboard, the signature “squelching” bass sound of acid house. Producers further defined the sound with distortion, creating a denser, harmonic rich sound by utilizing guitar pedals or even just overdriving the input of a mixer. Users could also exploit the system’s low voltage failure mode by removing the batteries, thereby erasing and completely randomizing the programmed patterns.

Acid Tracks: Acid House’s Breakthrough

Much of the TB-303’s beauty comes from idiosyncrasies like these, perhaps best exemplified by “Acid Tracks”. DJ Pierre, Spanky and Herb Jackson of Phuture released the track in 1987, a 12-minute jam session of trippy basslines and 707 drums (embedded below). Jefferson gave a copy of the record to Ron Hardy, another Chicago legend who played the record at Music Box. The track had to be played four times before the unique sound got a positive response, but “Acid Tracks” quickly became a hit and spread across the Atlantic to become a part of the Second Summer of Love. Britain’s burgeoning rave culture was in some part built by the 303, in addition to a thriving sound system culture and a newfound taste for ecstasy.

Notable releases of the time include Josh Wink’s “Higher State of Consciousness”, DJ Pierre’s “Box Energy”, and “Acperience 1” by Hardfloor, the Dusseldorf-based acid trance duo that utilized up to six 303’s at a time. Prior to the release of “Acid Tracks”, the 303 made appearances on “Rip It Up” by post-punk band Orange Juice (1983), “Les Problemes d’Amour” by Italian disco producer Alexander Robotnik (1983) and “On and On” by Jessie Saunders (1984).

Sleezy D’s “I’ve Lost Control” also lays claim to have been the first acid house record. It was release a year before “Acid Tracks”, which Phuture says they might have made in early 1985, so it’s impossible to determine which came first.

Before “Acid Tracks”

Another early adopter was Charanjit Singh on “Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat”. Singh’s track predates “Acid Tracks” by five years and is considered to be an independent originator of acid house. His fusion of Indian classical music with electronic disco was created in a completely different context than rave culture, just when synthesizers were becoming popular in contemporary Bollywood music, which already had a taste for disco sounds.

Singh got ahold of the box in Singapore, and experimented with its glissando function at his home studio alongside a TR-606 and Jupiter 8 synthesizer. The album was a commercial failure upon its release, but it was rediscovered in 2004 and garnered recognition as a pioneering proto-acid house record. Singh performing the album live for a few years before he died of cardiac arrest in 2015 at age 75.

From x0x0b0xTo TB-3: Modern Incarnations Of The 303

The TB-303 continued into electronic music’s bloom of genres after the late 80s, making a significant mark on acid trance, techno, goa and more with a resurgence in mods, software emulations and the release of Roland’s AIRA line. Some people skilled in electronics even took it upon themselves to create an open source clone of the machine called the x0x0b0x, released by Limor Fried. These DIY kits come very close to emulating the original sound, but are built on much more reliable systems with support for MIDI and USB interfaces. Brian Castro’s x0xi0 is another DIY kit available, adding a second oscillator, overdrive and an advanced routing matrix.

In addition to custom modifications that unlocked more features like Borg and Devil Fish, the above-featured Doepfer MS-404 was a popular commercial clone of the 303, in production from 1994–2000.

Most recently the TB-303 has been reincarnated as Roland’s new AIRA TB-3. The AIRA Touch Bassline Synthesizer is a digital reimagining of the original box, faithfully recreating the original signal flow and waveforms while adding MIDI, a pressure-sensitive touch keyboard and even reimagined the original battery glitch with a built-in random pattern generator.

Header image credit to Acid Pix on Flickr. 
Akhil Kalepu is a producer and DJ from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can check out his work at theinfamousAK.com.

The post History Of The TB-303: Roland’s Accidental Legend appeared first on DJ TechTools.

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Everett Railroad 2-6-0 #11 returns to steam for the first time in many years. Ride aboard on this scenic, exciting journey through the Pennsylvania countryside.

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Upon launch, Sony's PlayStation 4 had six of its eight CPU cores dedicated to gaming while two of the cores were reserved for a smooth operating system experience. According to Engadget, developers for PS4 games have now been given access to a seventh core within the dual x86-64 quad-core CPUs, with the operating system only requiring one single core to operate smoothly. While this will not impact current gamers or the current gaming experience, this action will thus give our gaming sessions in the near future smoother, faster and more beautiful gameplay by giving developers more power with which to work. Microsoft's Xbox One also recently opened a seventh core in its CPU in January, so our current generation consoles across the board will be surely be ready for next generation games.

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If you’re looking to grab the awesome new two-shoe collab from Nike SB, Anonymous, and UNheardof inspired by the 1990 World Series and aren’t in the Cincinnati area for their release on December 4th, then you’ll want to pay attention. The Dunk Low inspired by Anonymous’s and UNheardof’s hometown Cincinnati Reds and Dunk High inspired by their opponents, the Oakland A’s, will see a wider release on December 8th at select Nike SB stockists. For the full story behind the collaboration, visit our previous post on them, and then take another look at the Oakland version below.

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday may be behind us now, but Sony wants to keep people's shopping momentum going. The tech company today announced two PlayStation 4 bundles at a new low price: $300 each, albeit for a limited time. First up, there's the Th...

Nike’s classic and idiosyncratic Air Moc gets some modern tweaks this season, with this new version redesigned in Tech Fleece. Guaranteed to be the coziest sneakers you’ll wear all winter, the Air Mocs essentially become blankets for your feet with their unique slipper/aqua sock/hiking sneaker/moccasin hybrid design outfitted in fleece. The new-age Air Moc debuts in two colorways of Black/Cool Grey and Mulberry/Summit White that are available now in Europe, which means we should see them hit US retailers soon.

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