Bassline Baseline is a short documentary about the development and impact of the Roland TB-303 by Nate Harrison.
The production values are weak, the narration sounds a bit like a speech synthesizer and there are some mistakes (the TB-303 didn’t have a sine oscillator, it had a pseudo-square wave created by modifying a sawtooth), but the history makes it worth watching.
Today we have computer software, consisting of representations of a three-dimensional interface on a two-dimensional screen, being controlled by third-party software so as to emulate the sound of a machine built twenty years ago, which was itself built to emulate the sound of a machine built 30 years before it.
