Trappola 808

Trap came out of Atlanta in the early 2000s. Its first sound is credited to producers such as Shawty Redd, whose busy hi-hats over heavy bass became its signature, and DJ Toomp, who produced T.I.’s I’m Serious andTrap Muzik (2003), with Zaytoven beside them. Around 2009 Lex Luger started a second wave: heavy 808s, crisp snares, fast hi-hats and orchestral brass and strings above them. Since then Southside andTM88 of 808 Mafia, Metro Boomin, Mike WiLL Made-It, Tay Keith and many others have taken it around the world.

What the producers who teach it agree on, and what the generator follows:

• Half time. The grid runs at 130 to 160 beats a minute, but the kick and the snare move at half that: the snare, often doubled by a clap, lands on the third beat of the bar, not on two and four. At 140 it feels like 70.
• The hi-hats carry the time. In eighths or sixteenths, and rolled, especially at the ends of beats: in halves, thirds, quarters and sixths of a step (as FL Studio names them), louder towards the end, the pitch often ramping up or down.
• The 808 is the bass line. Long-decaying, tuned to the key, on or near the kicks, following the roots of the chords, sliding into notes and up the octave, mostly on the beats it lands on.
• Minor and dark: natural and harmonic minor, phrygian with its flattened second, bells and keys above.

Musicology has been slow to follow. Nazareno Bravo and María Emilia Greco describe trap, in Ethnomusicology Review(2018), as slow music on a stable pulse, built on the 808, with heavily processed voices and a do-it-yourself way of making and spreading it.

The Roland TR-808 (1980) made no samples: each voice is a circuit. Kurt James Werner, Jonathan Abel and Julius Smith modelled them at Stanford’s CCRMA, and their numbers are Trappola’s.

• The hi-hats and cymbal come from six square-wave oscillators on one chip, always running, at about 205.3, 304.4, 369.6 and 522.7 hertz, and two trimmed at the factory to 540 and 800, mixed and sent through band-pass filters near 3.4 and 7.1 kilohertz (ICMC 2014). The hats share one gate after them, which is why a closed hat cuts off an open one, here as on the machine. The cowbell is two of the same oscillators, 540 and 800, through its own filter.
• The bass drum is a bridged-T filter, a resonator near 50 hertz, rung by a one-millisecond pulse (DAFx 2014). Its pitch barely moves: the change at the attack lasts a few milliseconds, too short to hear as a sweep.

So the “808” of trap is not quite the 808’s: it is its bass drum with the decay turned up, sampled, retuned to play bass lines, overdriven, and made to glide between notes. Trappola does what producers do: a sine with a short knock, saturated, decaying for as long as you like, one note at a time, sliding when asked.

Hip-hop was built by sampling records, and trap kept the habit: a few bars of an old song, chopped, reordered, pitched to the key, laid over the drums. Trappola’s Radio does it with the world. Like Radiooooo, it travels by decade and by place; its records are 78s from the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, tangos, rebetika, sones, fados, blues and klezmer from 1900 to the 1950s, digitised for preservation and shared so they can be studied and used. Two bars become eight slices;Flip it reorders them, repeats some and stutters others, the way producers chop a record; fit to the tempospeeds or slows the sample with the beat, its pitch moving with it, as on the samplers of the 1980s and 90s.

Radiooooo itself is there too, in its own window: its catalogue is licensed, so its sound is not Trappola’s to cut, but it can be played along with, and tapping its beat sets Trappola’s tempo.

Each style weighs the same rules differently: how dense the kicks are, whether the hats run in eighths or sixteenths and how often they roll and in what, how often the 808 slides or jumps the octave, how long it rings, which scale, how busy the bells are. They are written after the producers who made each sound their own; none of their records is copied, and no pattern is theirs.

• Atlanta, the 2000s, after DJ Toomp and Shawty Redd.
• Rolling hats, after Lex Luger.
• Dark and sparse, after Metro Boomin and Southside.
• Keys and bounce, after Zaytoven.
• Memphis bounce, after Tay Keith.
• Drill, trap’s cousin from Chicago, London and Brooklyn.
• Plugg, after Pi’erre Bourne and the plugg producers.

• T.I., Trap Muzik (2003), with DJ Toomp.
• Young Jeezy, Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101 (2005), with Shawty Redd.
• Waka Flocka Flame, “Hard in da Paint” (2010), produced by Lex Luger.
• Future, DS2 (2015), with Metro Boomin, Southside and Zaytoven.
• Migos, “Bad and Boujee” (2016), produced by Metro Boomin.
• Playboi Carti, “Magnolia” (2017), produced by Pi’erre Bourne.
• BlocBoy JB and Drake, “Look Alive” (2018), produced by Tay Keith.