31) 808 Cowbell
Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody (1987)
Clang! There's a famous Saturday Night Live skit in which Christopher Walken, playing the producer of Blue Öyster Cult's Don't Fear The Reaper, repeatedly demands "more cowbell" from a bearded Will Ferrell, much to the annoyance of his bandmates. But TR-808-owning producers in the 1980s needed no such encouragement. The 808 cowbell pierces the mix of hundreds of dance records made during this time - particularly ones produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (Janet Jackson, SOS Band). The sound was, no doubt, partly responsible for one early review of the 808 criticising the machine for sounding like "marching anteaters" - but it still has retro appeal, and constantly threatens some kind of re-emergence.

 

32) Syndrum Toms
Amii Stewart: Knock On Wood (1979 version)
Of all the electronic sounds that were supposed to emulate real ones, surely the most unsuccessful were the early attempts at tom-toms by Pollard or, later, Simmons. The burst of noise followed by a downward sweeping sine wave was about as realistic as someone going "Boo! Boo-boo!" (and sounded surprisingly similar). While forever associated with cheesy disco, the sound also found its way into more credible records; The Cars' debut album features it on the track Good Times Roll, Sly & Robbie used it fairly judiciously, and you'll also hear it on a stack of reggae and dub records from that era, including ones by Black Uhuru. Pollard eventually went bust, while Simmons got much better at doing it (for example, the opening of the EastEnders theme).

33) Orchestra Hit
Yes: Owner Of A Lonely Heart (1983)
The unimaginably pricy Fairlight synth that Trevor Horn used in the early 1980s was partly responsible for the rise of the orchestral stab: a dramatic exclamation sampled from a real orchestra (playing a chord from Stravinsky's Firebird Suite in the case of the Fairlight) and inserted at regular points within the song. Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock contains an early example, and while Horn's use of it on records by Yes and the Art Of Noise could be considered "arty", it quickly became a cliche. Budget keyboards began including feeble approximations of the Stravinsky chord as a preset, and it could soon be heard throughout the work of Stock, Aitken & Waterman. (This should not reflect badly on the Firebird Suite, which is cracking.)

34) TB-303 bass
Daft Punk: Da Funk (1995)
The Roland TB-303, also known affectionately as the "acid dream machine" or "silverbox", became the defining sound of the acid house movement in the late 1980s. TB stood for "transistorised bass"; its swoops and squelches were little loved during the period it was produced (10,000 units between 1981 and 1984), and it was generally thought of as a niche product that was too difficult to program. But acid house tracks like Stakker Humanoid by Humanoid led the revival, and since then the little box has almost become fetishised; Fatboy Slim's debut was called Everybody Needs A 303, and recreations in the form of Novation's Bass Station and Propellerheads' Rebirth software have been hugely popular.

35) DX7 E. Piano
Chicago: Hard Habit To Break (1984)
The DX7, launched by Yamaha in 1983, was the first commercially popular digital synthesizer. It was relatively cheap, did the job well, and for advanced programmers it was hugely flexible. But it was exceptionally "fizzy", "crispy" or "bright" - particularly its E. Piano patch (renamed "Fulltines" on later models). Intended as an approximation of the Rhodes piano (see last issue), it replaced the Rhodes' smooth tones with excessive "tinkle", but was nevertheless used on a colossal number of ballads in the 1980s. One discussion forum online has a thread entitled "E. Piano - worst sound ever?"; the distaste with which it's viewed today is probably more to do with the saccharine nature of the songs it was used on than the sound itself, but it's rarely used nowadays.

36) Sample stutters
Paul Hardcastle: 19 (1985)
Some 30 years after it was first made commercially available, the sampler is still considered by many to be the most extraordinary musical tool to ever have been invented. But while it opened doors to a whole new world of sound creation, it also brought with it a number of hackneyed effects - including the orchestra hit, above, but also the rhythmic stuttering of speech. The ease with which spoken sentences could be assigned to one keyboard note and then repeatedly triggered led to an epidemic of this st- st- stuttering. Paul Hardcastle won an Ivor Novello for his efforts; the other most notable example from the mid 1980s was provided by Chaka Khan. Chaka Khan. Chak-Chak-Ch-Chaka Khan.

37) Amen drum break
NWA: Straight Outta Compton (1988)
The advent of sampling also meant that any existing recordings of unaccompanied drums were fair game as potential backbeats for new tracks. The most ubiquitous example is the "Amen break", a six-second drum solo snipped from the song Amen Brother by The Winstons, a B-side released in 1969. This small fragment of audio has been slowed down, sped up, cut into sections, rearranged and reworked so many times that, in the words of one documentary maker, it's become part of our "collective audio unconscious". NWA and many others used a simple one-bar loop, but when cut up it formed the basis of whole genres of dance music, notably jungle and drum 'n' bass. You can still hear the Amen break on any pirate radio station near you.

38) Opening lo-pass filter
Daft Punk: Around The World (1997)
We're all familiar with the old-style treble and bass EQ controls on home hi-fi equipment; our general impulse is to turn them up in order to make the music "sound better". Digital EQ, however, can place far more severe filters on treble or bass frequencies. One common effect - frequently used in French house music in the 1990s - was to place a low-pass filter across the whole track, making it sound as if it was playing next door, or underwater (or, in extreme cases, next door and underwater). Slowly opening the filter to allow more treble through slowly brought the track to life and allowed it to build to a euphoric climax, at which point we all leapt in the air and danced wildly.

39) Hey!
The Prodigy: Firestarter (1996)
The clipped, very English and much-sampled "Hey!" that decorates The Prodigy's blistering number-one single was originally recorded by The Art Of Noise. In the liner notes to their compilation And What Have You Done With My Body, God, Anne Dudley recounts the story. "That was Camilla. JJ [Jeczalik, fellow AON member] was going out with a schoolteacher who taught at quite a nice public school in Berkshire. And there were all sorts of very posh-spoken young ladies at the school and it was his idea to sample somebody... so Camilla came in with her friend and we sampled her saying ‚'Hey!' and ‚'Can I say something?'" JJ describes this female vocal as "much loved and, I think, in later years iconic..."

40) Auto-Tuned Vocals
Cher: Believe (1998)
Originally intended as a studio tool to subtly tweak the tuning of slightly off-key singing, Antares Auto-Tune became an instrument in itself with the release of Believe by Cher in 1998. Producer Mark Taylor cranked the effect to make any auto-adjustment clearly audible, and a new sound was born. "I wasn't sure what Cher would say when she heard what I'd done to her voice," he recounted - but she loved it, and insisted it stay despite record company objections. At the time it sounded extraordinary, but today it's almost the default setting across much British and American pop music; musically "perfect", but perhaps with too much natural human frailty stripped away.

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