Once upon a time, the most iconic sounds in hip-hop were from earlier music. A Lou Donaldson drum break, a Bob James loop. As synthesizers’ sample packs gained prominence, though, those sounds became anonymized, their provenance dating back only as far as the plugin kit. Ashwin Rodrigues does the good kind of doxxing in this Wired piece, tracking down John Lehmkuhl, the man who made the instantly recognizable—and damn near ubiquitous—metallic thunk sound known as Tribe.
When it was time to fill the Korg Triton with sounds, Lehmkuhl got to work. Set up in local recording studios or his home studio in Los Angeles, he would host recording sessions with horn players, DJs, and other musicians to collect sounds that would become integral parts of the synthesizer. A piano technician might come in, for example, and modify the hammers that struck the piano’s strings to soften a brittle note in the actual instrument before they’d record it.
Lehmkuhl had worked on previous Korg synthesizers, and at this point, he was the guy responsible for drum programming. He made a number of genre-specific drum kits, including a “Rap” kit. For this beat-building library, he wanted a range of sounds that would feel at home on both East Coast and West Coast hip-hop records. Previous synth drum kits would have a smattering of stock-ish sounds: a triangle, a tambourine, a shaker, for example. “I didn’t want it to be just those types of sounds,” he says.
