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Drum Machine History · Electronic Music

• Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast channel about electronic music and all things synth. I'm Oli Freke and in this episode I'll be talking about the history of the drum machine, that piece of now standard studio gear that generally provides a producer, musician or band with the sounds of a drum kit and many other percussion instruments in a compact electronic box of some sort. We'll cover analogue drums, digitally sampled drums, software emulations and the latest in 21st century hardware options and we'll notice how styles like synth pop, electro, house and techno of the 1980s still have influence over the modern musical landscapes of pop, rock and dance, largely due to a few key drum machines of their earlier era. Early Rhythm Machines Let's go back to the start. The acoustic drum kit, the original inspiration for the drum machine, consisting of a bass drum, snare drum, hi-hats, toms and cymbals, has been a staple of modern popular music in the West since the 1920s and the days of Dixieland jazz in America. In the earliest days of artificial rhythm machines then, the goal was to replicate the sound of a drummer playing a drum kit, maybe to accompany a band, but more typically for home organists to use as rhythmic accompaniment to their playing. The earliest of these was the Chamberlin Rhythmate, invented in 1949 by Harry Chamberlin and then developed further into the 1960s. An ingenious solution for the time, it simply offered a choice of 14 different pre-recorded drum rhythms on a looping tape. These rhythms were popular dances of the time, the Viennese Waltz, Rumba, Foxtrot and Tango. Amongst its many features was the ability to adjust the tempo by changing the tape speed. Actually, that was it's only feature, but this was the very first rhythm box, so we shouldn't expect too much. Another of these early rhythm machines was the Wurlitzer Sideman of 1959, which was slightly more sophisticated than the Chamberlin. It generated its drum sounds electronically and they were triggered by use of a rotating disc that had the individual beats of a rhythm represented as studs, which made contact with static brushes as it rotated, thus playing a rhythm. A very rudimentary mechanical sequencer, if you will. By changing the rotation speed, the tempo could be changed. Not only this, but there were several variations on each rhythm available and the individual drum sounds could be triggered manually by use of a row of buttons on the top. Though the sounds themselves were electronically created, they still relied on vacuum tubes at this time, not transistors, which came later. The First Korg Rhythm Machine Understandably, given the technology of the time, these first attempts were fairly crude and actually the limitations of the Sideman so infuriated a pair of frustrated users by the names of Tsutomu Kato and Tadashi Osanai that they founded the company that went on to be known as Korg and their first product was the KEIO DA-20 DoncaMatic Disc Rotary Electric Auto Rhythm Machine released in 1963, the word DoncaMatic possibly being chosen for its onomatopoeic donka donka quality. The earliest example perhaps of put a donk on it. But, like the Sideman, it too was actually electromechanical, making use of a rotating disc to trigger its rhythms and like the Sideman and Rhythmate, it included popular dance rhythms of the day, such as ballad, cha cha, bossa nova, beguine, rumba, mambo, habanero, western, tango and two types of waltz. The Invention Of The Transistor These early examples were electromechanical and of course, the invention that enabled the modern drum machine revolution, like so much else in the modern world, was the transistor. Invented in the 1940s at Bell Labs in America, they had started to become more widely available by the 1960s. Transistors are solid state electronic switches, far smaller than the bulkier vacuum tubes or valves that preceded them. They can be used in electronic circuits to produce analogue sounds, meaning that the electrical signal traveling through the circuit is analogous in shape to the resulting acoustic wave, once it's been emitted by a loudspeaker. The only drawback of analogue synthesis in this context is that it isn't great at creating the complex enharmonic frequencies of struck drums. An analogue oscillator is more like a string or pipe in the sense it can easily produce harmonic overtones from a sawtooth or square wave, but it's much harder to get them to create the clangorous mess of frequencies you get with percussion, especially the metal ones like cymbals and hi-hats. This explains the early and largely fair reputation drum machines had for not being very realistic. The problem is that synthesising convincing drum sounds with analogue circuits can be hard. Due to their nature, drums, hi-hats, cymbals and other percussive instruments generally have numerous complex vibrations interacting extremely quickly over a short time and these frequencies are often enharmonic, meaning that the overtones present in any given sound are not mathematically related by simple ratios, which is what gives them their complex, unpitched, drum-like sound. Which is a pity, because analogue circuits are very good at producing harmonic overtones, hence being quite useful for pitched tones and synthesising string or woodwind type sounds, but not so good at these more complex waves made of multiple enharmonic partials. However, given it was the only game in town and until the much later development of sampling, some effective techniques were developed and hardwired into the emerging category of analogue drum machines. An acoustic bass drum, for example, can be characterised as a low frequency thump with a click and that can be emulated, not very effectively, by a circuit emitting a brief low frequency note with a burst of white noise to accompany it. But a significant improvement on that approach can be achieved by the rapid sweeping of a sine wave from very high pitch to very low pitch, creating a fast transient and a low end thump that we interpret as satisfyingly kick drum like. Layering a high pitch click over the top became the effective and de facto method of later analogue drum machines. This audio clip shows how speeding up a pitch sweep transforms it into a solid kick drum. But it's worth noting that it took a while for this to be perfected. For example, Donna Summer's I Feel Love is pretty much all Moog modular, except for Donna Summer's voice, of course and the kick drum, which though Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte tried to synthesise on the Moog, it just wasn't good enough, so they overdubbed a real acoustic bass drum to give the powerful thump required. A snare drum is often synthesized by layering a burst of white noise with some pitched tones which are low pass filtered to remove unwanted bass and then band pass filtered to replicate the general sonic characteristics of a snare. Bongos, toms, claves and similar pitched drum sounds can be made from simpler tuned waves with an appropriately fast envelope and maybe a bit of pitch bending at the start to represent the deflection of a drum skin. But Metallic instruments are by far the hardest for analogue synthesis to achieve due to the aforementioned multiplicity of complex enharmonic frequencies. Methods such as FM synthesis, analogue or digital, ring modulation and cross modulation can create complex tones, but that tended not to be the methodology used by most analogue drum machines. The common approach, instead, is to use clusters of pulse wave oscillators tuned atonally, and band pass filtered. These can sound good, but no one would ever mistake them for a real cymbal. Solid State Rhythm Machines So, from the early 1960s, once the potential of the transistor was realised, several companies started to release solid state rhythm machines using analogue synthesis to create their sounds. Following the Doncamatic Rhythm Machines, which were updated to a solid state version in 1966, Korg created the Mini Pops range shortly after. One of the earliest was the Mini Pops 3 in 1967 with just four sounds, but there were other models in the range, the Mini Pops 5, 7, 20S and the last in the series being the Mini Pops 35 and the Mini Pops 120 in 1976. All Mini Pops came with preset rhythms. There was no way of creating your own at this time and they still reflected the needs of the home organist, their target market, playing the popular dance rhythms of the day, the Foxtrot, Bossa Nova, Samba and so on. The Mini Pops 7 was the most fully featured with 16 different sounds and 20 rhythms to choose from. There were even separate volume faders for the Criada, Guiro and Tambourine. But despite the limited control over the sounds themselves and the preset nature of the rhythms, the Mini Pops sound is still familiar to this day and something of a classic, having been made famous on records like Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene and Equinox albums from 1976 and 1978 respectively. Those records made great use of the Mini Pops 7. For example, Equinox Part 5, 6 and 7 all featured the Rock 1 pattern and Oxygene 4 is a combination of the Slow Rock and the Rock presets. It's also been celebrated more recently by the Aphex Twin on his track minipops 67 on the Syro album from 2014. Another world dominating electronic music corporation that made a large number of rhythm machines in the 1960s was Ikutaro Kakehashi's precursor company to Roland, Ace Tone. Kakehashi showed the first prototype, the Rhythm Ace R1, at 1964's NAMM show, but it wasn't licensed or commercialised. The probable reason for its failure being the lack of preset rhythms. You could only trigger the sounds individually in real time using buttons on the front panel. Though the sounds were transistorised, they weren't much use to an organist who may have his hands full playing his keyboard. By 1967 though, the first commercial product, the Rhythm Ace FR 1, was preset based and gave rise to around 20 different models until the last Rhythm Ace unit, the FR 7L in 1972. Several designs were also licensed to Hammond and Multivox to be built into their electric organs, again for the benefit of the home organist. Let's have a little listen to some of the rhythms from the first Ace Tone FR 1. As you can hear, drum machines of this era are generally charming, if a little crude by today's standards. To get around the limitations of presets, these early solid state drum machines offered some clever features. For example, the Ace Tones included the ability to mix two drum beats together and offered cancel buttons which could mute selected instruments, such as on the very first FR 1, which allowed the muting of clave’s, cowbell, cymbal and bass drum. Once Ikutaro Kakehashi started Roland Corporation in 1972, he continued development of the drum machine. The first batch of Roland branded drum machines released in 1972 were the TR 33, 55 and 77. The top of the range TR 77 was actually a re-packaged Acetone FR 8L and it featured a full 32 different rhythms of the now standard ballroom dance styles using 13 different sounds and of course the TR stands for transistor rhythm. Other analogue drum machines of the late 1960s include the Elka One, Farfisa Rhythm Unit 10 and the Vox Continental Percussion King, all of which are again preset rhythm machines for the home organist. However, the Vox Percussion King was one box that found its way out of the organist's home and it was to be used by Grandmaster Flash in the 1980s as part of his DJ sets. He'd bang out some live beats on it as a kind of solo in between records, and he referred to it as the Beatbox, which, according to a retrospective interview with him, he says, when people started to copy the sound with their mouths, the phrase human beatbox, or even beatboxing, was coined. One little box that has a small but lovely place in music history is the Mattel BG's Rhythm Machine from 1978. This little known actual toy that only produces pitched tones and doesn't even bother with attempting drum synthesis nevertheless was used by Kraftwerk on Pocket Calculator with a part that sounds a little bit like this. You may have seen footage of Ralph Hutter of Kraftwerk handing a small device to the audiences in concerts in the late 70s to trigger phrases and it was this. But it also had three banging beats programmed into it - Disco, Latin and Pops. Check them out. Using Drum Machines In Mainstream Hits So, as we enter the 1970s, we can see that rhythm machines are still analogue and are still based on the needs of the home organist with their preset rhythms, something which carried on well into the 1980s as anyone who had a Casio or Yamaha home keyboard at that time can attest to. Indeed, home keyboards of today still contain auto accompaniment beats and rhythms, though somewhat more modern options are offered. Despite the home organist focus of drum machines, some pop and rock musicians were beginning to experiment with them in more commercial music. Notably, Sly and the Family Stone used the little known Maestro Rhythm King MRK II on their 1971 hit Family Affair, which actually got to number one in the US Billboard charts, so qualifies as the first number one record to feature a drum machine. In fact, The Family Stone used it so much that the Maestro became known as the Funk Box for a time. Alongside this, the 1970s saw the rise of synthesiser music as a new genre in its own right and this most definitely featured electronic drum sounds. From the kosmiche and avant garde styles of Germany and Europe, to the electronic pop music of Yellow Magic Orchestra and the spacey synth music of Tomita, Jarre, Van Gelis and more. All were deploying electronic drum sounds, either from these early analogue drum machines or self constructed sounds on synthesisers. Though these musical styles weren't yet fully mainstream, the sound of the drum machine was increasingly being heard by the listening public and by the late 1970s, thanks to continued miniaturisation of transistors and the advances in instrument design, drum machines were sounding pretty good, so UK and US synth pop and post punk bands started using them as their main drum sound, partly as a reflection of their general obsession with all things futuristic. A great drum machine of this era is the Korg KR-55 from 1979, which has 48 preset rhythms with variations and fills, the ability to adjust the rhythm swing setting and 12 main sounds, bass drum, snare drum, hi-hat, low and high congas, rimshot, claves, cowbell and tom toms. A follow up KR-55B in 1982 doubled the number of presets. It was used by synth pop bands like Depeche Mode on their Speak and Spell album and the snare from it is so distinctive there's no mistaking it on songs like Dreaming of Me. Here's a recreation of it. Noting that Depeche Mode only really used the KR-55 for the snare sound, the kick on that album, just to mention, was made by Daniel Miller on an ARP 2600 using the previously described pitch sweep method, probably using the filter resonance generating the sine wave. Interestingly, the cymbals on the Korg KR-55 used pairs of cross modulated oscillators to create the necessary complex enharmonic overtones, whereas something like the slightly later Roland TR808 of 1980 still just used six basic pulse wave oscillators making for a slightly less complex sound. The First Programmable Drum Machines As much as the sounds were getting better by the late 1970s, these machines were still just playing preset rhythms, albeit with more variations and fills, but you couldn’t actually compose or program your own rhythms into them. This all changed in 1978 with the release of the Roland CR-78, the first commercially successful programmable drum machine. Roland had released several TR drum machines throughout the 1970s, but the CR-78 was different, and marking the change were the CR initials, standing for CompuRhythm, which refers to the inclusion of a programmable NEC microchip. A microchip being a custom, programmable set of transistors and one piece of silicon, an integrated circuit, the next most significant electronics revolution of the late 20th century, after the transistor itself. The CR-78 features 4 output channels and has 14 different sounds, including the standard kick, snare, rimshot and hats, but also a range of percussion sounds such as the maracas, claves and its instantly recognisable metallic beat sound, all of which added up to a classic sound set still popular to this day. Programming the CR-78 could be done in real time by overdubbing a couple of bars on repeat, or by use of the external WS-1 programmer, which allowed for programming in step mode for much more precision. There were four user accessible rhythm memories, each of which could sequence four different sounds. These user programmed rhythms could be overlaid onto the preset rhythms or played independently. The CR-78 also had an autofill for each rhythm that could be triggered in real time, all of which gave unprecedented flexibility. Coupled with its very distinctive drum sounds, it was an immediate hit. One of the most famous songs to prominently feature it is, of course, Blondie's Heart of Glass. The Heart of Glass intro is pure CR-78. A full 7 seconds at the start of the record is dedicated to this one drum machine, a mark of how revolutionary it was considered to be at the time, the rhythm used is a mixture of the Mambo and Beguine presets. Other songs of the era to prominently feature the CR-78 include In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins, Visage’s Fade to Grey, OMD's Enola Gay, Soft Cell's Tainted Love and John Fox's album Metamatic. It really was the sound of early 80s synth pop. The CR-78 wasn't actually the first or only programmable drum machine around this time, but it was the most successful. There was the esoteric and expensive, such as the EKO ComputeRhythm from 1972. This was extremely advanced for its time and only a few were made, so it's rare these days. It's an analogue drum synthesiser made in Italy, but it's notable for introducing the 16 note step sequencer format, one button per 16th note for the bar, something not seen again until Roland's TR808 in 1980. It had six rows of 16 buttons, and each row had a choice of two sounds. It has bass drums, snare, cymbals, timbales, blocks, clave and one charleston sound, which amazingly was an original name for hi-hats in the early evolution of the drum kit. The ComputeRhythm could even be programmed by punch card, which represented graphically the 16 by 6 grid of possible notes and could load a pattern in under a second. Due to its rather fetching grid of orange lights and a sort of computer looking box, it also cropped up in several Italian sci-fi films of the early 1970s as well. Another programmable drum system was the PAiA Programmable Drum Set, which was released in 1975 and had a big fan in Peter Gabriel, who used it on his Melt album of 1980 and on tracks like Songs Without Frontiers. Though it was indeed programmable, it was monophonic, meaning you could only have one drum sound at a time. Then there was the BOSS DR-55 in 1980, a simpler and cheaper unit with only four sounds, kick, snare, hi-hat and rimshot, but which also had a 16 step programmable memory. Lastly, I shall mention the Movement Drum Computer of 1981, which was a British drum machine and an early prototype was used by Dave Stewart on the Eurythmics hit song Sweet Dreams. The Introduction Of Drum Pads And Brains We'll tackle the 1980s in a moment, but let's take a diversion into ways of controlling a drum machine and its sounds. It's all very well pressing play and hearing a preset rhythm play back, but the most natural way a drummer might want to play a drum sound is by, I don't know, hitting a drum with a stick and playing the rhythm themselves in real time. So by rigging up some kind of electronic drum pad that a drummer could hit seems like an obvious thing to do. Kraftwerk have been doing this with their tin foil covered sticks and pads since the mid 70s. Though those tin foil covered sticks were controlling customised versions of the Farfisa Rhythm Unit 10 and Fox Percussion King drum machines. Again, those were originally just analogue preset machines intended for, you guessed it, the home organist market. One of the first commercially available options was the Pollard Syndrum released in 1975. It immediately became responsible for the classic pew pew disco sound as heard on Joe Bataan's Rap-O Clap-O, which is a better track than its name suggests, but possibly the first to use the sound in this way. It's also heard in the intro for Sparks Tryouts for The Human Race and in their number one song In Heaven Amongst Others, which was produced by Giorgio Moroder, still riding high on the electro disco wave. The Pollard Syndrum used robust drum pads that triggered sounds from a blue analogue drum synth module and it came in one, two and four pad versions. Other electronic drum pad systems of the time were the star instruments Synare of 1975 and the Pearl Syncussion in 1979. It was very important to call your product Syn something in those days - Syndrum, Synare Syncussion - sinful. A more sophisticated set of drum pads and analogue drum brain as the sound generator became known was the Simmons SDSV of 1982. Instead of a few disparate pads that could be attached to a drummer's rig, the Simmons was a drum kit, complete with bass drum head, snares and toms. Their distinctive hexagonal pads became a familiar sight throughout the 1980s and the first recording to feature them was Spandau Ballet's Chant No.1. And a fun fact, probably more relevant to UK listeners, is that the famous doof doof that kicks off the EastEnders theme is a Simmons drum kit. The Roland Octopad of 1985 was a similar concept, except that its 8 pads were arranged in a less showy 4x2 grid. Drummers also had the option of triggering electronic drum sounds, or indeed any sound, by micing up their existing acoustic drums and using the audio signal to trigger different sounds from a drum brain. The Alesis D4 from 1991 was one such of these. It was a fully featured sample playback drum machine with 12 audio ins, through which to trigger any of its 500 high quality 16-bit sounds. Other form factors, such as the hand drum, have been made as well. Roland have been making a series of HPD digital hand drums for over 20 years and in a recent edition of Sound On Sound, the Lumen hand drum is reviewed, the Lumen being a digital version of the New Age favourite, the hang drum. The Arrival Of Digital Samples And The Linn Drum But let's return to the traditional drum machine. By the late 1970s then, these were generally analogue, featured a reasonable selection of standard drum sounds and a few exotic snaps and analogue beats usually played back in preset rhythms. However, there was one dissatisfied instrument designer by the name of Roger Linn, who is on record as saying that he was so fed up with analogue bossa nova rhythms chirruping away like crickets, that he just had to invent the Linn Electronics LM-1, the first drum machine to drop analogue synthesis in favour of digital samples. Clearly this would be a step change in realism, given digital reproductions of drums could in theory be perfect simulacra of the real thing. And indeed it was. Released in 1980, the LM-1 was an immediate sensation despite the high cost of around five thousand dollars. But for the studios and producers that could afford it, it heralded the first of the 1980s many digital revolutions in sound. The LM-1 had 128-bit sounds sampled at a maximum of 28kHz. These were a kick, snare, hi-hat, cabasa, tambourine, two toms, two congas, cowbell, claves and a handclap. Cymbals weren't one of the included sounds due to the long sample time required and correspondingly high cost of the memory needed to store it. Each drum sound could be individually tuned and have an accent selectively applied within a rhythm and each sound had its own volume fader and a pan control on the front panel, with individual audio outs for each sound. It was a professional machine, clearly designed for the studio where this level of control was necessary and expected. This was not a drum machine for the home organist. The onboard sequencer was a revelation too. Rhythms could be tapped in in real time to a metronome and the autocorrect feature would snap any stray beat back into time, which could be set anywhere from 30 seconds up to eighth notes via triplets, but if that was then too rigid, the odd numbered eighth or sixteenth notes could be swung to reintroduce some sense of groove back to it. There are 100 memory slots for rhythms, of which the first 25 were read only, leaving 75 for the user to record into as they wished. And if you didn't like the sounds it came with, you could swap out the EEPROM chips holding the samples for, and I quote from the manual, a harder rock snare, or a splash snare. You could even send Linn Electronics your own sounds on tape and they would blow an EEPROM chip for you, to use the parlance of the day. The LM-1 was immediately popular with musicians such as Herbie Hancock, Michael Jackson, Fleetwood Mac, Prince, Peter Gabriel and Stevie Wonder. This really broke the drum machine out of the electronic music and synth pop ghetto and delivered it onto the global pop and rock scene for everyone to hear. For a time, the sound of the LM-1 seemed to be on every hit record, and it, and its subsequent models, is now one of the defining sounds of the 1980s, in the same way that the Yamaha DX 7 and Roland D 50's digital synth sounds are also synonymous with that decade. The first release to feature the LM-1 was Leon Russell's album Life and Love, released in 1979, a year before the machine was commercially available. Not a surprise, as the record was actually co produced by Roger Linn. Herbie Hancock is perhaps a better known artist and his album Textures, released in 1980, is another very early release to feature the LM-1. Other notable early recordings include the Human League's Dare album - Martin Rushent had one of the first, if not the first, LM-1 in the UK. There's also Pete Shelley's HomoSapien, Devo's New Traditionalists and Gary Newman's Dance album. Ultravox drummer Warren Kahn was also a fan. Reviewing it for Electronics and Music Maker magazine in September 1981, he said, The Linn is so far ahead of anything in its field at the moment, that it's just not worth drawing comparisons. Though the LM-1 was a sensation, it was just the first of the series and sold in relatively low numbers. It was followed up in 1982 by the Linn Drum, which was a slightly cheaper and improved version and it sold in much larger quantities than the original. Additional sounds now included the crash and ride cymbals, though these longer samples had to be spread across six or seven individual ROM chips as they were so demanding on memory. The Linn Drum also offered 5 trigger-ins to enable a drummer to directly use the sounds, or indeed, as the manual suggests, to overdub a poorly recorded drum sound on tape by using that recording to trigger and re-record the Linn’s superior and more predictable sound. We've suddenly come a long way from the Mini Pops of a mere 10 years earlier. The final Linn Electronics drum machine was the Linn 9000, released in 1984. This added MIDI and velocity sensitivity to the pads and now sported 18 voices, sophisticated velocity driven timbral variations and many other advances. Unfortunately, the operating system wasn't up to the ambitions of the unit and it gained a reputation for unreliability, which, along with the newly available cheaper alternatives, led to Linn Electronics’ demise. The Era Of Sampling Drum Machines But luckily for Roger Linn, and electronic musicians everywhere, Akai hired Roger Linn and David Cockerell, ex of EMS and Electro Harmonix, to design a new sampling drum machine and this resulted in the release of the Akai MPC-60 in 1988 and represented a continuation of the main design concepts of the Linn 9000. The MPC-60, or MIDI Production Center, was an all in one sampling drum machine. It could sample, sequence and playback entire arrangements with many parts, like drums, bass and synth sounds. Sampling itself wasn't a new thing by 1988, but the form factor of the MPC-60 was. One large box, with a grid of drum pads, multi track sequencer and large LCD meant it was a new kind of all-in-one music production system based around sampling. As this was before computers could do everything, to have a comprehensive music composition tool like this was immediately popular. It offered 32 12-bit sample slots and came with 750 kilobytes of sample memory giving 13.1 seconds sample time. The MPC-60 inspired a wave of hip hop and rap DJs and producers to use it as their central production tool. DJ Shadow and J Dilla are just two of the best known exponents of the art of the MPC. But it was hugely popular and influential and proof of its utility is in the fact that Akai still design, update and release MPC sampling drum machines to this day, 35 years later. A significant impact that this kind of sampling had on music production was the ability for producers to sample the drum beats that DJs had specialised in featuring prominently in their sets in the 1980s. Disco DJs and New York Bloc Party DJs had noticed how the dancers loved the breakdowns in records that featured drum solos, so those breakdowns with beats, or Breakbeats became early targets for sampling. Thus today, the drum breaks from records like The Incredible Bongo Band's Apache, James Brown's Funky Drummer, Lynn Collins’ Think About It, and of course, of course, the Winston Brothers Amen Brother Break, are also now staple sounds of the modern musical era. Roger Linn himself, obviously still fascinated by electronic drums and drum machines in general, teamed up with Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits in 2011 to create the Dave Smith Instruments Tempest, a six voice analogue drum machine, Roger having obviously overcome his previous distaste for analogue crickets doing the foxtrot. Though the form factor of the Akai MP-60 was new, there were actually several earlier sampling drum machines. The Sequential Circuit's Drum Tracks of 1984 was an 8-bit sample playback drum machine featuring 13 sounds a very crunchy sounding drum machine it was too. Emu are a company well known for their association with the art of sampling, starting with their Emulator series from 1981. But they also used this expertise to make a sample based drum machine, the Drumulator, in 1983. The first sub $1000 option. It came with 12 sounds held on EEPROM chips and was extremely successful, selling maybe as many as 10,000 units. Like the Linn LM-1, the Drumulator's EEPROM chips could be swapped out for third party sounds and the precursor company to DigiDesign, DigiDrums, released a sample set called Rock Drums. Peter Gotcher, one of the founders of DigiDrums, has recently stated that he actually sampled the biggest recorded drum sound of all time for this Rock Drum set. They comprise samples of Led Zeppelins When the Levee Breaks and the Drumulator with DigiDrum's Rock Drum Set installed was used on many songs, including the Beastie Boys Beastie Groove and by Tears For Fears on their 1984 song Shout. Its follow up, the SP-12, came out in 1986 and added sampling. It could hold up to 8 12-bit samples at 27.5kHz and had 48 kilobytes of memory, giving a total of 1.2 seconds sample time, which could be expanded to 5 seconds if you bought the Turbo expansion. The SP-21 was used on Tears For Fears Shout and the Beastie Boys Beastie Groove, both of which used the Rock Drums set. The SP-12 was rapidly followed up by the SP-1200 in 1987, which dropped all the preset ROM sounds in favour of increased user sampling time, to a mighty 10 seconds. Even though it was a 12-bit sampler at 26kHz, producers loved the sound of it and remarkably it remained in production until the late 1990s, which is when Emu finally exhausted the supply of SSM chips that they used for its analogue filter. Another famous synth company, Oberheim, were narrowly beaten to the glory of releasing the first all sampled drum machine in 1980 by the Linn LM-1, but their DMX drum machine of that year undercut the LM-1 with its list price of $2800 and equally high quality sounds. It's probably most famous for the drums on New Order's Blue Monday. The DMX had 24 sounds, compared with 12 on the rival LM-1 and included crash and ride cymbals. It could sync to tape and had 8 trigger-ins with a 2000 step sequence and memory as well. The DMX has been used on tracks such as the Pet Shop Boys West End Girls and Madonna's Holiday and Into the Groove and The Human League's Human. Use of the sample based drum machine in mainstream pop songs was helping to make the sound of these early digital drum machines extremely widely heard at this time. Whilst they still might not quite fool a professional into thinking it was a real drummer, this new generation of drum machines did bring a new level of realism and power to the songs they were used on and maybe a lot of the listening public wouldn't necessarily have realised that these weren't in fact real drummers playing real kits. Either way, the sound of these great early sample based drum machines, the Linn LM-1, Linn Drum, the Oberheim DMX, the Emu Drumulator and SP-12 are synonymous with that period of 1980's rock and pop music. The Impact Of The Roland TR-808 and TR-909 But now let's go back, once again, to 1980, a pivotal year it would seem for the drum machine, to pick up another thread. As well as those first Linn and Oberheim sample based drum machines, 1980 also saw Roland release a little known unit they called the TR808, which you've probably never heard of. OK, you may just have heard of it, but it's true that the all analogue TR808 did indeed make little impression at the time of its release, being just another analogue drum machine and overshadowed by the ultra modern LM-1, with its fancy samples sounding all realistic and everything and the TR808 story is certainly a fascinating one of how the wisdom of the crowds perhaps ultimately uncovers the best things, even if it takes a while. The standard story is that no one was very interested in the 808 at launch. It cost $1195 in 1980, equivalent to approximately $4000 or £3000 today. Despite their high cost, they soon started showing up in second hand shops in Chicago and Detroit for as little as $100, where they were picked up by aspiring DJ producers in the area looking for affordable kit. This all resulted in TR808 and other contemporaneous synths and drum machines, appearing on the nascent post disco music of the time and the 808 would go on to claim Electro Boogie as one of the first styles it inspired and became associated with. It was probably the cowbell that did it, on tracks like Africa Bambata's Planet Rock. Electro was a fairly short lived genre of the early 80s and it soon gave way to a brand new phenomenon from Chicago - House music. This replicated the basic boots and hats drumbeat of disco, which had been introduced by drummer Earl Jones back in 1972 on Melvin and the Blue Notes song The Love I Lost. The steady pulse of kick drum on each downbeat, snare on the backbeat and open hats on the offbeat is now the default rhythm of the modern world - house, techno, pop, EDM and much else besides. And it just sounds so right on an 808. The kick booms with weight and solidity, created by a special type of oscillator called a Bridged-T network, essentially a self decaying oscillator that doesn't require separate VCA and envelope generators. The snare is crisp and tight, a burst of filtered white noise and again a pair of Bridged-T oscillators for the tonal component. Coupled with the classic snappy control over the envelope, it can cut through any mix. The hi-hats and cymbals slide into any track with ease, despite not sounding particularly like the real things due to the complexity of metallic sounds as noted earlier and on the 808 are created with a bank of 6 pulse wave oscillators, appropriately detuned to metallic type atonality and run through bandpass filters. And of course, the cowbell - two enharmonically tuned pulse waves and a band filter. Another style the 808 heavily influenced is hip hop and ever since the early 1980s, the TR808 sound set has become one of its staple sounds. These days the focus is on its booming bass drum, now functioning more as a syncopated pitched bass instrument than the acoustic drum it was designed to be and that's something I love about the connection between these instruments and the music they’re used to make. Creative musicians using and sometimes abusing them in ways their designers could never have envisaged, in service of realising their musical vision. Suffice to say, the TR808 is a cornerstone of the modern sound world and it's impossible to overstate the influence it's had, and the number of records and pieces of music it's been used on. But when Roland's Ikutaro Kakehashi ran out of the faulty transistors he acquired as a job lot from the US military, there could be no more original TR808 units made. And so If we're going to talk about the 808, we can't not mention the 909, the other Roland drum machine of the 1980s that changed the landscape of music forever. The Roland TR909 of 1984 is harder sounding than the 808 and given its appearance four years after the 808, there are some key differences. Crucially, it now uses samples for those hard to synthesise hi-hats and cymbals. These are actually only 6-bit samples and they pass through an analogue circuit for envelope control and filtering. And the kick is no longer a bridged-T network oscillator, but a standard pitch swept sine wave which is actually a wave shaped sawtooth in order to get it closer to the sine wave. It was picked up first by producers of an even newer house adjacent style in the mid 1980s - Techno. The 909 has become techno's defining sound, if not indeed completely fetishised by the practitioners of the style ever since and like the best of the underground, it too, like the 808, has made its way into being a staple sound of modern pop music. It can be heard on thousands of tracks, from Derek May's Strings of Life, Jeff Mills minimal techno banger The Bells, to Orbital's Belfast, to Madonna's Vogue and Daft Punk's Revolution 909. It's solid yet characterful and able to complement a wide range of supporting sounds, whether synth, keyboard, guitar, or voice. It is hard to think of any other two drum machines that have had such an impact on the modern musical landscape as the TR808 and TR909 and their influence seems to be as strong today as they ever were, over 40 years after their launch. Other Notable 80s Drum Machines And those weren't the only classic drum machines Roland made in the 80s and whilst I can't explain their erratic numbering system, I can give a brief description of each. The TR606, released in 1981, was a small silver analogue drum box with only 7 sounds, designed as a companion to the silver TB303 bass machine. The TR707 of 1985 was actually Roland's first all sample drum machine, a mere 5 years after the Linn LM-1 and Oberheim DMX. The TR727 is the same cosmetically as the 707, but contains Latin percussion. It would seem the electronic drum industry hadn't quite let go of the Foxtrot and Bossa Nova, or they'd noticed the rising popularity of New York's Latin Freestyle, an offshoot of electro as introduced by songs such as Shannon's Let The Music Play. Over in the mainstream pop charts, you can hear the Latin percussion sounds of the 727 rattle away on the intro to the Pet Shop Boys cover of Always On My Mind. There were some lesser known TRs, a TR626 released in 1987, which was an evolution of the TR505 of 1986, neither of which are particularly distinctive it must be conceded. The Introduction of MIDI It's fair to say there was a lot going on in the early 1980s and another development in the electronic music industry had an equally significant impact on drum machines as it had had on every other part of the ever growing digital studio and that was the introduction of MIDI in 1983. Before MIDI, it was hard to synchronise other kit with drum machines. Analogue CV triggers could be used to start and stop rhythms, or to send a stream of clock pulses timed to 8th, 16th, etc. On something like the Korg KR-55, you could actually send triggers from just one instrument, or you could trigger individual analogue sounds with control voltages, but you'd need a full blown analogue sequencer with multiple channels sending to individual drum synth modules. And whilst Moog actually built a prototype modular drum synth in 1972, the 701, it was never productionised. Later, digital systems were introduced which made it easier to control a device through one cable and have control over multiple sounds and parameters. Roland had their digital control bus, others used Din Sync and Oberheim had the Oberheim system, but these were proprietary and a sequencer from Roland wouldn't be able to control a drum machine made by Oberheim. Of course, MIDI changed all that, as a standard control system that could interface any manufacturer's equipment with any other. Now anything could control anything. Drum machines could be integrated into a system where it would be in sync with another sequencer, arpeggiator, or even computer based systems. Suddenly, everything was in time and playing along nicely with each other. I'm not sure at which point MIDI channel 10 became the standard channel for drums, but it's certainly true that the General MIDI spec of 1991 locked in what now seems to be a fact of nature. A kick drum should always be mapped to note C1, a rim shot to C#1, a snare to D1, a clap is always on D#1 and hats must, must always be on the first group of black notes with the toms in between. It's hard to imagine it could ever have been any other way. The first drum machine to feature MIDI ports was the Roland TR 909, not a surprise since Roland's Kakehashi worked closely with Sequential Circuits Dave Smith on the original MIDI specification. Correspondingly, the Sequential Circuits Prophet 600 of 1982 was amongst the first synthesisers to sport MIDI ports. Standardised Layouts And Spec So, here we are in the mid to late 1980s and by now most of the big manufacturers have released drum machines and the category has settled down into a fairly standard form factor and drum machines now have certain expected features. They usually have a grid of drum pads on the top surface, they have an onboard sequencer with MIDI controllability and they all come with a large selection of usually 12-bit samples comprising the standard drum kit and increasingly more exotic world percussion and other effects. Popular units of the mid to late 80s include the Yamaha RX-11 of 1984, the KY-R50 of 1988 and the Casio RZ-1 of 1986. Actually, the Casio RZ-1 also featured sampling. Yes, you could sample four sounds with a maximum length of 0.2 seconds each, or combine those four for one mighty 0.8 of a second sample. It's easy to scoff now, but compared with no sampling capability at all, this was a great deal better than nothing. And by the early to mid 90s, the general drum machine spec had improved again. Samples were now 16-bit and you had maybe a couple hundred of them now. The sequencer capacity was larger and the editing and manipulation of sounds was more sophisticated. Machines of this era include the Roland R5 and R8 of 1989 and the BOSS series such as the DR-550 and DR-660. Boss, incidentally, are a subsidiary of Roland and have a long tradition of affordable gear for musicians, including their earlier two analogue drum machines, the DR 55 and DR 110. And Alesis, in the early 90s, released possibly the most successful drum machine of all time, the SR-16, a real studio workhorse. It had 233 samples, 400 pattern memory, MIDI, and a decent selection of articulation parameters controlled by velocity and more. An unsung hero perhaps, but extremely widely used. Interestingly, Alesis was a firm set up by Keith Barr, who had previously worked on a not very well known 8-bit drum machine of 1983 called the MPX-185 drum computer. His new company's SR-16 has been a great deal more successful, it must be said. And final fun fact, Alesis's name is is a contraction of the phrase Algorithmic Electronic Systems AL E SYS. Analogue Circuit Modelling And Software However, sound generation technology has never stood still and drum machine designers weren't content to leave things with mere perfect samples as the be all and end all of drum sound emulation. Having generally passed over FM as a useful generator, they moved straight to a very modern method - Analogue Circuit Modelling. Through the extreme cleverness of instrument and software designers, it became possible to emulate real world electronic circuit boards made of capacitors, resistors and transistors in software, to emulate the behaviours of analogue circuits without needing the physical components at all. And which analogue circuits were the first to be modelled by this method? Why yes, our dear friends the TR808 and TR909 and the machine to do it was the Novation DrumStation released in 1996. To be fair, the DrumStation actually also used samples for some of the sounds like cowbell, ride and handclap and only deployed the ASM or Analogue Sound Modelling technique for the more important sounds like the kick, snare and hi-hats. And there was an analogue modelling clone of the 808 and 909 that ran on desktop computers, the Propellerhead RB338 Rebirth software from 1997. It was possibly more famous for its analogue modelling of the Roland TB303 bass synth, but there was also an onboard 808 and 909, which again made use of samples, but unlike the TR909, whose samples were processed through analogue VCA and filters, those too were now modelled in software. From that point on, it was clear what the direction of travel was to be. A computer, by the year 2000, could record audio in a far more flexible way than multi-track tape ever could, not to mention soon being far cheaper and easier to maintain and it could now apply plug-ins to virtual instrument tracks, which of course could now include drum machine emulations, samplers and synthesizers. Emulations of old instruments and entirely new instrument paradigms were now possible. Another new paradigm of this sort is the mathematical modelling of acoustic drums and other resonating objects, making possible a whole new category of drum sound realism through use of software. Though there are several computer based physical modelling drum plug-ins, there doesn't seem to have been a dedicated drum machine using physical modelling until Korg's Drum Volca released in 2019, which utilises waveguide modelling on top of analogue style synthesis. Roland's V-Drum systems also incorporate aspects of waveguide and physical modelling, though these also make extensive use of samples as well. But given the use of computers has only become ever more sophisticated and more widely available over the last 20 years, this has arguably taken the focus away from hardware. But it doesn't mean that everyone stopped using drum machines. Rather, everyone finds their own best blend of hardware and software and everything in between, in pursuit of their own music making goals. It's just that the options are hugely more varied now than they've ever been. And despite the rise of computers and clever software, hardware has never really gone away. For example, and rather remarkably, the Alesis SR-16, first released in 1990, is still available new to buy today. And as mentioned, the evergreen Akai MPC format is still being updated and sold by Akai. And there are other variations of the all in one sequencer synth drum machine sampler these days, such as the Elektron Analog Rytm, the Native Instruments Maschine and more recently the Ableton Push 3. Not only this, but a resurgence in all things vintage has seen a slew of reissues, clones and variations on a theme of many classic drum machines. I won't even attempt to list the many clones of the 808 and 909 that have been made over the years, but many others are now available as well. Back To Hardware With Eurorack Modular But there has been another hardware revolution 20 years in the making, which is now more popular than ever and has had a correspondingly large set of electronic percussion devices built in support of it. I am of course talking about Eurorack Modular, which got off to a relatively quiet start with the Doepfer A-100 modular synthesizer system in 1994, just as computers were really beginning to dominate. But for reasons beyond the scope of this podcast, this new modular format drew more and more attention until we have today's full blown resurgence in all things modular, a fascinating nod back to the earliest days of synthesis. More and more modules are being produced in the format, including, of course, drum modules, which range from the smallest one unit 808 hi-hat clone to the full-spec six channel Erica drum module and many, many others of course. Not all new hardware is Eurorack of course. Other form factors are continuously being explored, with different pad layouts to encourage different types of playing. Stick based pads are ever more sophisticated, in full drum kits from Yamaha, Roland and Pearl and smaller pad systems, such as the Nord Drum 3P. Drum Pattern Generation With AI And finally, talking of new technologies, this wouldn't be a podcast made in 2024 if I didn't also mention generative AI. Again, a huge topic and the potential benefits or even dis-benefits are nowhere near being settled, but it's clear that using AI for drum pattern generation and maybe even as a sympathetic artificial drumming companion to a human's playing could be a significant development. But, with rhythm being central to so many modern music styles and more profoundly with rhythm just being a fundamental aspect of human music making, the drum machine is never going to go out of fashion, no matter what the form factor, sound generation method, or musical style it's put to use in support of. I can't wait to hear what future combination of the as-yet unreleased drum machines and the creative use to which musicians put them to will sound like. Thanks for listening to this podcast, I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Thank-you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information, along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcast website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.