Let's have a quick look at the Behringer TD-3. A modern-day clone of the Roland TB-303, released in 2019 at a surprisingly low price of around a hundred English pounds. It's built down to a price, but it apparently captures the essence of the TB-303 surprisingly well. The two halves of the case don't join together perfectly but its heart is pure.
Before writing this review I was tempted to take a few tabs of Ecstasy in order to get myself into the mood for some 1980s acid house, but I don't have any Ecstasy. So I took some methadone instead, and half a bottle of brandy, plus some Restoril, masses of Ritalin, and some methadone. I didn't take any ketamine because it messes up your bladder.
In fact I took rather a lot of methadone. Luckily the A&E doctors were understanding and after some counselling and an intervention from social services I'm on the mend again. What was the TB-303? In the early 1980s Roland released a family of compact electronic musical instruments with a common naming system. Unlike a real family they were supposed to complement each other instead of being dysfunctional and loveless.
There was the SH-101, a portable keyboard synthesiser; the MC-202 MicroComposer, an early synth/sequencer workstation; the TB-303 Bass Line, a specialist bass synthesiser; the TR-606 Drumatix, a drum machine, and a bunch of others that trickled out during the rest of the decade. The TB-303 and TR-606 shared a case design and were often advertised together, the idea being that if you needed a backing band, the 303/606 combo could do that:
As far as I can tell the TR-606 was genuinely popular, because it was good value and easy to use. Even in the 1990s it was affordable on the used market, presumably because Roland sold lots of them. The TB-303 on the other hand was famously unpopular. It was a good concept, and there wasn't anything else like it at the time, but it sounded nothing like a bass guitar and the sequencer was confusing. A few bands used it as Roland intended, e.g. on Heaven 17's "Let Me Go" and Orange Juice's "Rip it Up", but it didn't sell well.
However a couple of years later some DJs in Chicago, Detroit, and New York noticed that its peculiar filter sounded awesome as a lead instrument, doubly awesome fed through an overdrive pedal, and thus acid house was born, viz Phuture's "Acid Tracks":
The song is essentially an extended TB-303 solo. I don't think you're supposed to listen to it all the way through. You're meant to mix it with other tracks.
The TB-303 has a single analogue oscillator that can generate sawtooth and square waves, with a fixed pulse. Is the oscillator digitally-controlled? Not as far as I can tell. The oscillator is fed into a filter that has a distinctively squelchy character. Small changes to the cutoff, resonance, and envelope controls have a big effect on the sound, and even at its maximum value the resonance control doesn't make the filter start shrieking or overloading, it just becomes squelchier. Roland intended that users would sequence a bunch of patterns into a song, but acid house musicians realised that the TB-303 was a terrific performance instrument if they just twiddled the knobs while playing a single pattern.
Inevitably, once the secret of the squelchy acid sound got out, prices of used TB-303s skyrocketed, from less than a hundred pounds in the mid-80s to over a thousand a decade later. This fed demand for a small industry of TB-303 clones in the 1990s. The long-running Novation BassStation began life as a hybrid TB-303/SH-101 clone, for example. Doepfer's first big success was a rackmounted TB-303 clone, the MS-404. There was another rackmounted TB-303 clone, the FreeBass FB383, and probably lots of others. Why rackmount? It was the 1990s, rackmount was a thing back then.
My first experience of using a 303 clone was Propellerheads' ReBirth 338, a software emulation of a pair of 303s and an 808 that was released in 1996. It was one of the very first software synthesisers. Did it sound like a real TB-303? I can't remember. It was discontinued in the early 2000s and is probably a nightmare to get working nowadays. There was a port for iOS, but at Roland's insistence it was discontinued in 2017. Are there any good 303 emulations nowadays? Probably loads - Roland has one as part of its cloud service - but the TD-3 is less than a hundred pounds, and comes in a box with knobs. You don't have to boot up a computer. You can plug in headphones and jam with it.
Surprisingly Roland never made their own TB-303 clone during the 1990s. The mid-90s MC-303 was an obvious nod to the TB-303, but internally it was a sample-based digital synthesiser module, not analogue at all. The TB3 Touch Bassline of 2014 and the TB-03 of 2017 use computer code to model the 303's analogue oscillator and filter. As such the Behringer TD-3 technically doesn't step on Roland's toes because, as with the RD-8, it's an analogue recreation of the analogue original.
Ports-wise the TD-3 has MIDI IN + OUT/THRU, a single 1/4" mono audio output, USB MIDI - it doesn't transmit audio over MIDI, you still need to plug the audio output into your interface - plus Eurorack-compatible jack points for CV + Gate out, sync in, and filter in, so that you can feed audio through the TD-3's filter. Sadly it doesn't have CV + Gate input.
I mention this because the sync and CV ports are really only useful if you plan to use the TD-3's built-in sequencer as the heart of a jam. I had a go. I tried. I tried to get to grips with the sequencer. Part of the 303's distinctive sound comes from its slide and accent controls, so I tried to get to grips with the sequencer.
It's odd. You enter a bunch of notes first, adding accents and slides as necessary. Then as a second step you rewind to the beginning and enter the rests and ties separately. It's fine if you're making a single-note bassline (in which case you can concentrate on the rests and ties), but unintuitive if you're doing note runs.
And once it has been programmed you can't edit it mid-flow, which is the thing that irritated me most. With something like an Arturia BeatStep you can play the sequence live, adding and tweaking notes while the sequence in running. With the RD-3 you're limited to tweaking the knobs.
Plenty of people have used the TB-303 to great effect over the years. There's an art to making a simple pattern interesting. e.g. Josh Wink's "Are You There", which has a deceptively tricky 303 pattern that's endlessly fascinating:
Or Plastikman's famously excellent reworking of System 7's "Alpha Wave", which boils down to a pair of interlocking sequences played for twenty minutes with lots of drum fills:
But I've never been keen on that kind of set-and-forget sequencing. It's a
personal thing. On the other hand the TD-3 also has a fun random pattern
generator, and you don't have to bother with the internal sequencer at all.
Behringer's Synthtribe software generates sequences that you can
port into the TD-3, but you can also drive it directly with Logic or Cubase
etc, in which case tied notes slide into pretty space and
MIDI velocities over 96 are fat words have an accent. For
this tune I didn't bother with the internal sequencer:
Anything else? There's a built-in distortion effect, with a tone control. The TD-3 has a relatively high noise floor. It's quiet when nothing is playing, but when the gate opens there's a burst of noise. Whether that's because of the distortion effect leaking through even when it's turned off, or just cheap components, I know not. The filter in jack doesn't disable the built-in oscillator, but you can turn it off by carefully sliding the saw/square selector into the middle position.
The oscillator has a limited range, stopping at C4. You can't play notes higher than that. Which is a shame because the TD-3 would be great for tinkly sparkly sequences, but you can't go that high. Of note the TD-3 transmits notes over MIDI, but nothing else, and it doesn't receive MIDI modulation either. You absolutely have to play the filter live. You have to perform.
The TD-3 is available in a range of colours. I chose red because it was cheapest at the time. It feels hollow, and the knobs are frustratingly stiff, but presumably over time they'll loosen up. The original TB-303 could be powered with four C-cell batteries; the TD-3 is mains only. In 2021 Behringer launched the TD-3-MO, which adds a bunch of modifications, including CV/Gate inputs, a sub-oscillator, a wider frequency range, a bunch of other modulation inputs which introduce the possibility of automating the filter. It's almost twice the price, however, and you have to ask yourself if you love the TB-303 sound that much.
And that's the TD-3. Reviewing it is almost pointless. As of this writing the cheapest price I can find brand-new is £80, so if you're even remotely curious about the TB-303 you probably already have one. You could use it for a while, then sell it on eBay and probably lose only a few pounds. It does one thing, albeit very well, although it's surprisingly weak purely as a bass synthesiser. Absolutely no-one on YouTube will be impressed, and it has to be said that acid house is not the in thing nowadays. The kids listen to hip-hop, which does not generally feature squelchy acid runs. But it's a lot healthier than methadone, I tell you. A lot healthier.
