- Alternate meaning: The Acid House a 1994 novel by Irvine Welsh, later made into a film.
Acid house is a variant of house music characterized by the use of simple tone generators with tempo-controlled resonant filters. It began when musicians discovered that they could create interesting sounds with the Roland TB-303 analogue bass synthesizer by tweaking the resonance and frequency cut-off dials as they played. The term "acid" was used in Chicago at the time as a term for the squelchy "acid" sounds of such bass synthesizers such as the TB-303, and has no connection to LSD (in fact, the drug most commonly associated with the acid house scene was MDMA, or Ecstasy). Acid house music became a central part of the early rave scene in the U.K., and the yellow smiley became its emblem.
Since the early 2000s, acid house has shifted focus from its sole use of the 303, but remains true to the original concept: repeated sequences of sound being shifted and warped by modulation over a period of time.
Notable acid house artists
See also: Madchester, acid house party
Sources
- Shapiro, Peter (2000) Modulations: A History of Electronic Music: Throbbing Words on Sound, ISBN 189102406X.
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