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TB-303 Give-Aways from Propellerheads and d-lusion
slashflood writes "Good news for those of you who are into music synthesizers: Propellerheads has opened its Rebirth Museum and gives away the 'revolutionary' software simulation of the classic Roland TB-303. Interestingly, that happened just a day after the small German company d-lusion released another 'legendary' TB-303 simulator called Rubberduck as a free give-away."
somewhere? I can't recall exactly when, maybe 3-4 years ago, but I seem to recall another open source 808 emulator being shut down by propellerheads and then pulled from sourceforge for being "too close" in UI design to rebirth.
Not that it isn't a good thing propellerheads is doing by giving it away for free, but shutting down open source projects (this was even mentioned on slash) is a bad thing for everyone in the long run. How about releasing your source propellerheads? Re-birth is about as old as Quake3, if Id can do it, so can you.
Anyways, end rant.
Speaking as a TB-303 owner, who spent quite a while a/b testing ReBirth, it does come remarkably close.
I've been fooled from time to time, and I've had exactly that sort of 'you can tell it's real' comment from people who know I own the real thing, about tracks I've used purely ReBirth on.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Yes, but there is musical innovation happening with guitars. People are constantly doing new things with guitars.
Where as the 303 sound has totally stagnated. The 303 was remarkable because it was this cheap little synth that cats could buy for next to nothing and create sounds that the makers of the 303 never intended. It was part of the whole philosophy of black urban youth taking this discarded technology and turning into something remarkable, a kind of metaphor for discarded Urban areas like Detroit and Chicago that spawned Techno and House music respectivly.
But now the 303 isn't a cheap synth for underground producers... it is an expensive synth for collectors that creates a sound that stopped being innovative ten years ago. It is not the instrument that the Juan Atkins or Derek May of the 21st century is going to use, it is for pretensious wankers... it is like collecting a Stratovarius.