808 Cowbell Download
Sabina Gream
A tradition was born. Cavaleri attended every game in the series from 1924 to 1967, dutifully presenting the cowbell to a representative of the winning team. He thought it was lost forever after the 1935 game, a 14-13 Vanderbilt win at Grant Field.
According to his son Ed Jr., Cavaleri posted a notice of the missing cowbell at the Georgia Tech YMCA. A pair of Tech students later came forward, telling him the bell was at the home of a friend in North Carolina. It was returned on the eve of the 1937 game.
The rivalry petered out after Georgia Tech withdrew from the Southeastern Conference in 1964 and the cowbell mostly faded from memory. The teams have only met three times in the last half-century, most recently a 56-31 Georgia Tech victory in 2009.
The list of places to look was dwindling. Ed Cavaleri recovered his cowbell on the few occasions it went missing. Was our luck about to run out? Had the last bell tolled on the Georgia Tech-Vanderbilt rivalry trophy?
To think: had it not been for a printer that was low on toner, the cowbell may have never been retrieved this week. But on Saturday it will ring out once more, marking the return of a modest, obscure and unmistakable Georgia Tech tradition.
It's interesting to note that most societies have developed bells of one sort or another, and that in each case they evolved along similar lines. This is inevitable; it's inconceivable that a civilisation could cast a 200-kilo cathedral bell before hammering a small cowbell out of a simple sheet of metal, and it therefore follows that the earliest metal bells were exactly that... small, hammered from a sheet of metal, and not dissimilar to the cowbells now used by alpine herdsmen and drummers alike.
Figure 1: The Roland TR808 cowbell.Given the significant differences between them, you won't be surprised to discover that cowbells are quite unlike the church bells and handbells that we discussed last month. These, as I discussed, are shaped to produce distinct pitches with recognisable harmonic series. In contrast, cowbells conform more closely to the concept of three-dimensional plates, something I mentioned as far back as Part 2 of this series (see SOS June 1999). Unfortunately, synthesizing realistic cowbell timbres has proved to be difficult using subtractive techniques in the past, and I am not aware of any programmable analogue synth that offers a convincing patch. In fact, I stumbled across my favourite cowbell patch quite by accident, as we will see towards the end of this article. The story starts, as it has done before, with an analysis of the analogue cowbell sound on the Roland TR808.
Figure 1 shows the block diagram for the cowbell sound generator in the TR808. This is a relatively simple circuit, and uses just two of the six pulse-wave oscillators that provide the basis of the machine's cymbal and hi-hat sounds. The outputs from these pass through a pair of VCAs controlled by a contour generator, and through a band-pass filter that removes the upper and lower partials. Finally, the result is then amplified before reaching the outside world. I have redrawn this in standard Synth Secrets format in Figure 2.
I dug out a vintage drum machine to use as a sonic reference; the CR8000 CompuRhythm, another Roland unit of the same era and similar timbre that I prefer for its cowbells, claves and congas. By listening to the CR8000 cowbell and then sweeping two oscillators on my Nord MicroModular, I determined that the sound comprises a pair of tones with fundamental pitches of approximately 587Hz and 845Hz. With a frequency ratio of 1:1.44, these are suitably clangy, and serve Roland's purpose well.
Figure 4a: A simple AD contour.At this point, it's worth complimenting Roland, because even small deviations from these pitches destroy the cowbell illusion. I would love to know how the company's engineers stumbled upon such an elegant solution.
Figure 4b: The cowbell amplitude contour.Having determined this, I chose a multi-stage envelope generator, Multi-Env1, inserted this after the mixer, and chose suitable values for the three-stage 'A/D1/D2' contour.
Figure 5: Modelling a cowbell on the Nord MicroModular.In truth, the sound produced by Figure 5 is not identical to that generated by the CR8000, but it's close, and is every bit as valid as that produced by the Roland. What's more, a patch like this allows you to adjust the initial timbre, amplitude envelope and final tone colour, so in many ways it's far more useful than the predetermined sound coming out of the back of any preset analogue rhythm unit.
Now, here's a trick that I've used on many occasions to fine-tune imitative patches... I sample the sound I'm trying to emulate, and then replay it two or three octaves below its original pitch. This reveals many signal components that are of either too high a frequency, or too short a duration to be distinguished at the normal pitch. Performing this experiment on the CR8000's cowbell reveals no extra high-frequency information, but exposes a halo of noise surrounding the partials, particularly during the impact phase. I was able to recreate this on the Nord by adding a noise generator to the two oscillators, choosing a suitable 'colour', and mixing it in at a low level. I found that pink-ish noise (ie. one with the high frequencies suppressed) gave me the effect that I wanted, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 8: Mixing the oscillators.Now we must mix the outputs from the oscillators. I found that I needed to add a little more of the higher frequency than the lower in order to get as close as possible to the CR8000 cowbell. This accentuated the upper partials of the sound, and gave it a bit more of the desired 'clank' (see Figure 8).
It's now time to see how it all hooks together. I directed the outputs from the oscillators to the mixer, setting the level for each as discussed. The output from the mixer passed to the VCA, which was controlled by the contour generator, and the shaped sound was then filtered before reaching the outside world. I have shown this in Figure 11, using blue 'cables' to show the audio signals, and black ones to show the single CV from the contour generator to the VCA. This is consistent with Figures 2 and 3. Once I had tweaked everything to perfection, I added a trigger to the contour generator's Gate-Trig In input, and my cowbell patch was ready to play.
Once I had discovered this, I was curious to see how far I could take my cowbell sound. I started by adding a second contour generator and a CV mixer to recreate the precise contour in Figure 4b. I then added a little noise, and then a smidgen of reverb... Oh, what the heck. Do it yourself. Have some fun.
Figure 16: The cowbell and claves patch.To be honest, I'm very pleased with this patch. It's an almost precise recreation of the clave generated by my Roland CR8000, but it's more aggressive. And, once again, it's a sound that you can reproduce on simpler synths.
The most unique and certainly the most resounding symbol of Mississippi State University tradition is the cowbell. Despite decades of attempts by opponents and authorities to banish it from scenes of competition, diehard State fans still celebrate Bulldog victories loudly and proudly with the distinctive sound of ringing cowbells.
The precise origin of the cowbell as a fixture of Mississippi State sports tradition remains unclear to this day. The best records have cowbells gradually introduced to the MSU sports scene in the late 1930s and early 1940s, coinciding with the 'golden age' of Mississippi State football success prior to World War II.
Whatever the origin, it is certain that by the 1950s cowbells were common at Mississippi State games, and by the 1960s were established as the special symbol of Mississippi State. Ironically, the cowbell's popularity grew most rapidly during the long years when State football teams were rarely successful. Flaunting this anachronism from the 'aggie' days was a proud response by students and alumni to outsider scorn of the university's 'cow college' history.
In the 1960s two MSU professors, Earl W. Terrell and Ralph L. Reeves obliged some students by welding handles on the bells to they could be rung with much more convenience and authority. By 1963 the demand for these long-handled cowbells could not be filled by home workshops alone, so at the suggestion of Reeves the Student Association bought bells in bulk and the Industrial Education Club agreed to weld on handles. In 1964 the MSU Bookstore began marketing these cowbells with a portion of the profits returning to these student organizations.
In 1974, the Southeastern Conference adopted a rule against all artificial noisemakers at football and basketball games. On a 9-1 vote, SEC schools ruled cowbells as a disruption and banned them. However, in 2010, the SEC revisited the topic of cowbells and have allowed to let Mississippi State ring bells during pregame, timeouts, halftime and after the Bulldogs score. During the one year probationary term, Bulldog fans are asked to follow these guidelines in an attempt to permanently be allowed to carry cowbells at home games.
More cowbell is a pop-culture catchphrase that stems from a comedy sketch about 1970s rock music. The sketch centers around a character who seems to believe that the cowbell, a simple percussion instrument, is the secret ingredient to make a song work. More cowbell can stand in for anything that a person is longing for or feels is lacking. The phrase may also be used as a simple shout-out to other fans of the sketch.
This is not meant to be a formal definition of more cowbell like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of more cowbell that will help our users expand their word mastery.
The cowbell is a hand percussion instrument used in various styles of both popular and classical music. It is named after the similar bell historically used by herdsmen to keep track of the whereabouts of cows.
760c119bf3