Roni Size made some of the music that helped move drum and bass from underground clubs toward a much wider audience, but the studio behind New Forms was surprisingly restricted.
One of his main tools was the Roland S-330 sampler.
It gave him only around fourteen seconds of total sampling time.
Fourteen seconds.
Yet Size preferred it to contemporary Akai machines because its screen and editing functions allowed him to manipulate those seconds in unusual ways. Samples could be reversed, stretched and reorganised while ghost notes helped construct increasingly detailed rhythms.
This is a useful reminder of what early drum and bass production actually involved.
A breakbeat was not an unlimited audio file sitting on a modern timeline.
Memory had a price.
Every sound competed for space.
If the sampler was full, something had to disappear or be shortened.
That restriction encourages another kind of listening.
You stop thinking in complete recordings.
A hi-hat may only need milliseconds.
A snare needs slightly more.
The useful part of a break may be smaller than the break itself.
Modern producers can load gigabytes without noticing.
Roni Size could build an album around seconds.
The interesting question is not how little technology they had.
It is how much musical information they learned to hear inside almost nothing.
