In 1996, Fatboy Slim released his single “Everybody Needs a 303,” and the genre that would become known as Big Beat was born. The song paid tribute to the Roland TB-303, a bass synthesizer/sequencer that had long been a key component in the hardware arsenal of many influential electronic music composers. The instrument initially helped define house music as Chicago musicians picked up and manipulated the 303, and its squelchy synth patterns became ubiquitous when the acid house boom took hold in the early ‘90s.
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