The TR-808 is basically singularly responsible for the most popular genre of music in the United States today (hiphop), as well as in conjunction with its younger sibling the TR-909 all of modern dance music via house and techno. It's sort of an amazing swath of modern music. A true pioneer.
That's substantially overstating the case. The TR-808 is an iconic drum machine, but you're far more likely to hear a cut-up sample of the Amen Break or the Funky Drummer Break.
The importance of the TR-808, TR-909 and TB-303 is largely accidental. These units were a commercial failure and gained cult success largely because they could be bought cheaply. In much the same way, grunge musicians tended to use whatever horrible old guitars were languishing at the back of pawn shops - Fender Jaguars and Jazzmasters, Mosrites, Teiscos and Danelectros.
In my opinion, by far the most important work done by Roland was the development of the MIDI standard. Ikutaro Kakehashi and Dave Smith moved mountains to get the industry to agree on a common standard. MIDI was the starting pistol for the modern age of music production.
> grunge musicians tended to use whatever horrible old guitars were languishing at the back of pawn shops
Roland had a connection to grunge too - Boss effects pedals were a division of Roland, and Kurt Cobain used the DS-1 and DS-2 Distortion pedals on Nirvana's albums.
Frequently amen break and others are replayed and not sampled. Some of those on the link not even amen breaks. Whosampled has tons of the false reports - many of those are not samples but replays, either on 'real' drums or drum machines. Whosampled more accurately is who borrowed
A novice producer was walking in the forest with Sensei Akai. The novice asked Akai "If I extract the groove from the Amen Break using Beat Detective, then replay it with identical-sounding samples, is it still the Amen Break?". Sensei Akai replied "Mu". The novice was enlightened.
The reissue (whist not sounding _exactly_ the same) is pretty faithful, The TB03 [0], which will be on demo in a local music shop for sure.
If you want to get the most out of the hands-on, read the manual/watch tutorial videos before you head in, so you're not trying to figure it out in the short time you're there, you can just get stuck in (this is advice from a synth addict who is pretty much creating a museum at this point).
It's not singularly responsible. It would have happened with or without it (the people responsible for Hip hop and house/Garage/Techno were incredibly resourceful making the the best of what they could lay their hands on)- but it would sound very very different. No 808 and whole genres like trap and electro probably wouldn't exist.
My argument is that because those genres would sound very very different without that machine that the 808 is singularly responsible for them sounding the precise way that they do. :)
I upvoted you, but I would somewhat correct you saying how the technology helped unlock the creativity of the pioneers of these genres. Although we rightly focus on Kakehashi here, I just want to be careful not to erase the marginalized people that used these tools to actually make the music.
