Super 808 Sound Pack

This isn't a stock 808.

The Roland TR-808 is the drum machine hip-hop and house music were born on. I love mine — but I wanted more than the classic sounds. So I had it professionally modified: new controls wired straight into the original analogue circuits, so the sound can be shaped far beyond what Roland allowed in 1980. That machine is the Super 808, and this pack is the only place you can get its sounds.

What the modification adds

• Variable kick drum tuning and length — from the classic boom to sub-bass drops and tight, short kicks
• Split snare drum tuning — the two halves of the snare circuit tuned independently
• Extra-long and extra-short claps
• Extra controls on the toms, and a new transformer so the whole machine runs cleaner and quieter than it did from the factory

Sampled extensively — not sampled and stretched.

Here is the difference from most 808 packs. The variations in this collection were not made by taking one kick and pitch-shifting it in software. Every one of the 900+ hits is its own recording, played from the real analogue circuits with the knobs set differently each time. The original 808 sounds are in here exactly as they are, and next to them sit the tones only the Super 808 can make — all of them analogue, all of them first-generation.

Each voice was taken from its own individual output, through the Yamaha Nuage converters in the Doctor Mix studio, at 24-bit / 44.1 kHz. No gimmicks, no fake enhancement, no processing between the circuit and the file — just the pure 808 sound with massively extended tone variation, cleaned and trimmed so every sample drops straight onto the grid.

I curated these sounds specifically for studio production: no gimmicks, no fake sound enhancement, just the pure 808 sound with massively extended tone variation.

What's in the box

• 900+ one-shot samples — kicks, snares, claps, hats, toms, congas, cowbell, clave, maracas, rimshot and cymbal, each in its full range of tunings and lengths. 24-bit WAV, works in any DAW or sampler.
• 11 ready-to-play kits — Classic, Tight and Super full kits, plus single-instrument kits for Kick, Snare, Clap, Hi-Hat, Tom, Conga, Percussion and Cymbal. Built for Steinberg HALion Sonic SE, which is free.
• 7 famous 808 patterns — the grooves from seven classic records, programmed on the Super 808 and delivered as MIDI, stereo loops, multi-tracks and printable programming charts.
• 7 original tracks by Doctor Mix — Latin pop to analogue drum & bass, supplied as full multi-track construction kits you can pull apart and build on.

Watch it being built. Then watch it being played.

The whole Super 808 story is on the Doctor Mix channel — from taking the machine apart with audio tech Clive Kavan, to the finished unit, to the beats and the famous patterns it has been used for since.

The Super 808 story

The pack presentation is above. Here is how the machine got there — three episodes of surgery — and then the Super 808 at work. Every sound you hear in these videos is in the pack.

Pimping Up My Roland TR-808 — Pt.125:39

10 videos · 147 min

The 808 comes apart. Clive Kavan and I start planning what the extra controls will do.

• 25:39Pimping Up My Roland TR-808 — Pt.1
• 22:41Pimping Up My Roland TR-808 — Pt.2
• 23:26Pimping Up My Roland TR-808 — Pt.3 (finale)
• 7:04The Roland TR-808 In Action
• 4:477 Super Famous TR-808 Patterns
• 7:15Top 3 Greatest 808 Beats
• 9:33"Sexual Healing" 808 Drum Pattern Explained
• 23:01How To Make Beats With The 808 (808 Day)
• 14:167 Top 80's Drum Machine Beats Reconstructed
• 9:37Producers DREAM About This!!

Watch the series on YouTube ↗

Who this is for

Producers, beatmakers and remixers who want the real thing without owning (and restoring, and modifying) a forty-year-old drum machine. Drop the one-shots into any sampler, load the kits into HALion Sonic SE, learn the classic grooves from the charts, or start a track from one of the construction kits. Instant download, royalty-free, yours forever.