I’ve owned a few 808s and sampled all of them. They were indeed all different sounding. The cowbells are one exception and sounded more like the 2 Live Crew example. Most of the variation was in the hi hat and cymbals. Which IIRC is 6 square waves and a noise source.
Very interesting! Thank you! I did a little looking and found this FWIW...
I noticed in OP's post that the two frequencies for the cowbell are 540hz and 800hz (although I don't see where this is denoted on the original schematics.) But we'll assume they're accurate numbers.
While a perfect fifth is a difference of 7 semitones, this produces a difference of only 6.804 semitones. It would seem that its designers didn't have a perfect fifth in mind.
Also, 540Hz is C#5 -45 cents and 800Hz is G5 +35 cents. So neither note seems intended to correspond to any natural key.
> While a perfect fifth is a difference of 7 semitones, this produces a difference of only 6.804 semitones. It would seem that its designers didn't have a perfect fifth in mind.
Remember that 7 semitones is not a perfect fifth. (Note this depends on your definition of perfect fifth, some people allow for being close, since equal temperament is so common.)
While a perfect fifth is a 3:2 ratio of frequency, seven semitones isn’t exactly 1.5, it’s more like 1.498.
800/540 is ~ 1.48, so I definitely agree the designers weren’t going for a fifth, very likely they wanted some beat interference to give it a nice metallic warble.
I purposely repeated the OP's wording but since we're talking about an astable multivibrator,frequency and duty cycle (in percent) makes sense. I did a lot of circuit design for communications systems and I associate the words mark and space with ones and zeroes in a frame/word.
