303

One day in 1982, Earl "Spanky" Smith picked up a 303 in a Chicago secondhand music store and took it back to his place, where his musical partner, DJ Pierre, tinkered with the box. Pierre played with a row of knobs for adjusting the bassline; the controls were meant to be set, then left alone during recording or rehearsal. But Pierre programmed a bassline, hit the Run button, then cranked each of the knobs to its upper limit as the bassline was playing back. The 303 reacted with a piercing, almost obscene screech.



"Spanky was saying, 'Keep doing it, keep doing it!'" Pierre remembers. "It wasn't meant to squeak and squeal and all that kinda stuff. We just knew it sounded weird and energetic and funky. We thought, 'Wow, this thing is really a jolt of lightning!' So we taped it and took the tape to the Music Box. We played it, and by the third time people were going crazy."



Though they didn't know it at the time, by adding the warped, druggy 303 sound to then-standard club beats, Pierre and Spanky had invented a new genre of dance music: acid house. They dubbed themselves Phuture, then released their 303 experiment as "Acid Trax." That record, was a massive club hit in Chicago. But once imported to England, this and similar tracks became salvos in a massive youth cultural movement that invented electronic subgenre after subgenre.



Acid went up one notch when the shitty 606 drum machine was replaced with the 909, which gave it a harder dancier beat.



The 303 is the little silver box that's given mankind a BIG fat funky sound. Wicked to listen to and awesome to dance with!!