How the Drum Machine Revolutionized Music a Senior

How The Drum Machine Revolutionized Music A Senior Thesis Presented to The Faculty of The Music Business Entrepreneurship and Technology The University of the Arts In Partial Fulfillment Of the requirements for the degree of BACHELOR OF SCIENCE By Joshua Ayers May 7 2020 Over the past few decades, the drum machine has revolutionized the music industry and helped shape where popular music is today. A drum machine is an electronic musical instrument that produces electronic drum sounds as well as other percussive instruments. Drum machines may create sounds using pre recorded samples or using analog synthesis. The drum machine emerged in the late 20th century most popularly with the LM-1 and the TR-808 which helped the development of genres such as techno, dance, house, acid and the most popular hip hop. Producers such as Sly Stone, Prince, Lex Luger, South Side and Kanye West, to name a few, are among the influences that have taken the drum machine to the next level. The history of the drum machine starts with Sly Sylvester Stone. Sly played a pivotal role in the development of soul, funk, rock, and hip hops throughout the 1960’s and 70’s. Even in today's music, his influence is everywhere from artists such as Anderson Paak and Thundercat. Sly continues to be sampled by hip-hop producers today. His music has been sampled over 800 times (Pepper,The sample legacy from Sly and the Family Stone) making him one of the most sampled artists in music. Sly Stone is without a doubt an innovator in every sense of the word. One of his greatest contributions to music is the use of the drum machine. Legend has it, bandmates of the Family Stone started to get frustrated with Sly’s behavior (drug addiction) and some of them stopped taking calls from him, including drummer Greg Errico. As a solution to finding a drummer, Sly stumbled upon the MRK-2. “The Maestro Rhythm King MRK–2 is a handsome groove box with a row of brightly colored buttons reminiscent of a TR–808” ( Heath, Gear Tribute: The Maestro Rhythm King MRK-2, Sly Stone’s Favorite Drum Machine) Back then, drum machines were never looked at as instruments.They were used to accompany organists and other instrumentalists as documented in Joe Mansfield book BeatBox: A Drum Machine. They were pretty much glorified metronomes until Sly came along. Sly was the first person to use the drum machine as an actual instrument. The first person to use one on record. “With their weirdly burbling toms and anemic snares, the Rhythm King’s sounds don’t resemble “real” drums. The Latin preset rhythms, which fascinated Stone, felt woozy and off-kilter. Here was an unexpected foundation to an emergent funk aesthetic that Stone would eventually share globally on There’s a Riot Goin’ On, but Stone Flower is where he first got to experiment” (Wang, Sly Stone, the Original Rhythm King). The drum machine changed the way the world heard drums, let alone percussion. A decade later, a new artist by the name of Prince, would take Sly’s same methods with the MRK-2 and apply it to a new drum machine called the Linn LM-1 Drum Computer. In 1979, guitarist Roger Lyn created the first sample based drum machine. There were only 525 created and the starting price was $5,000, which is about $17,600 in today’s time. Disco was coming to an end and Prince knew he had to come up with a new, refreshing sound the music industry had never heard before and the LM-1 was his secret weapon. The LM-1 was the first drum machine to use digital samples. It even featured rhythmic sequencing such as swing factors, shuffle, accent and real time programming. There were a lot of artists that would later use the LM-1 such as Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Peter Gabriel but no one used it like Prince did. “Unlike other artists who merely programmed a simple beat and let it repeat as-is, Prince manipulated the LM-1's preset sounds, aggressively finger-drummed patterns and fills, and—as you'll read more about below—used the machine's individual and stereo channel outputs to run the one-shots and patterns through effects.” (Carlozo, Prince’s Drum Machine: How His Use of the Linn M1 Heralded a New Age of Pop Rhythm Culture). Prince also did something not even the inventor Roger Lyn ever imagined of doing with the LM-1. Prince connected his guitar effect pedals to the machine which created a totally unique sound from anybody else using the machine. In an interview Izotope did with Dr. Susan Rogers, Rogers explains how he “He liked to take a percussion mix that would come out of the output of those little faders and run it through his Roland and Boss effects pedals. So, let’s say for example, the hi-hat, cymbals, cabasa, and claps might all be running through a Boss pedal where we could add distortion. We had that heavy metal pedal, the brown one. He had the orange distortion pedal, and the delay, the blue one” (Rogers [Izotope] In the Studio with Prince—Getting His Sound). Following the success of the LM-1 there were a number of drum machines invented shortly after. Oberheim introduced the DMX which had similar features to the LM-1like the use of digital audio samples and the swing feature. There was also the Sequential Circuits Drum-Traks and Tom, the E-mu Drumulator, the Yamaha RX11 and the SpecDrum by Cheetah Marketing, which was an 8 bit sampling drum machine. The SpaceDrum was also one of the cheapest drum machines made at the time starting at roughly $30 compared to other drum machines like the LM-1 that were priced for thousands of dollars. But in1980, there was another drum machine that would change music forever, the Roland TR-808. Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer, commonly known as “the 808”, was created by Japanese engineer/inventor Ikutaro Kakehashi and was one of the first drum machines manufactured by Roland from 1980 to 1983. It was one of the first drum machines that let users come up with their own patterns rather than using pre existing patterns such as the LM-1 features. Another feature that made the TR-808 different from its competitors was that it was completely analog. It produced its own electronically manufactured sounds rather than using samples of drum kits meaning it was the absolute first of its kind. “The “TR” in TR-808 stands for Transistor Rhythm, and the 16 onboard sounds that it is capable of pumping out are all created through analog circuitry.” (Owen, TR-808 Drum Machine Flashback). The TR-808 featured 16 percussive sounds: bass drum, snare, toms, conga, rimshot, claves, handclap, maraca, cowbell, cymbal, and hi-hat (open and closed). It had its own futuristic sounds as many would say. The TR-808 “incorporated a number of groundbreaking features including volume knobs for each voice, multiple audio outputs,and the immediate precursor to MIDI” (Kirn, Keyboard Presents: The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music). Users could also program up to 32 patterns using the step sequencer, place accents on individual beats, set the tempo and time signature including unusual signatures such as 5/4 and ⅞. The 808 was priced at US$1,195 in 1980 which is equivalent to $4,005 now in 2020. But when it came out, electronic music had yet to reach the mainstream resulting in a low amount of sales. Roland ended up selling under 12,000 units ultimately becoming a failure. Roland ended production of the 808 in1983 after the semiconductors became impossible to restock. Despites its commercial failure, the TR-808 soon built a cult following for producers who couldn't afford the LM-1.By the time they were dicontinued the 808 had dropped down to prices as low as $100. “Detroit techno producer Juan Atkins bought "the first 808 in Michigan" when he was still in high school, using it for his band Cybotron….The 808 was the perfect tool for his future music, a "hi-tech funk" inspired equally by Kraftwerk and George Clinton, and was a cut above the primitive DR-55 drum machine he'd previously had” (Thomas,The Roland TR-808: the drum machine that revolutionised music). Roland credits Yellow Magic orchestra, a japanese electronic group, to be the first to use the TR-808 in a live performance with 1000 Knives in 1980. They were also the first to feature the TR-808 in a record called BGM in 1981. Over the course of the 80’s the TR-808 would continue to grow in popularity because of its unique unusual sounds, specifically its deep growling booming bass drum which would later get the nickname, “the 808”. In 1982, Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force had recorded their hip-hop track Planet Rock which became a massive success.The song combined elements of hip hop and dance music. It also featured a sample from Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans Europe Express’, that would essentially give birth to electronic music and would shape the sound of hip hop and techno. The 808 was the driving force behind it all. Producer Greg Brousard from Los Angeles remember’s going to a local store and playing the TR-808 after hearing Planet Rock for the first time. "I programmed the Planet Rock beat and fell in love with this machine," he remembers dewily. "It blew me away.

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