James Brown, time and drumming
A chapter of Cold Technology, Hot Beats
Clap your hands, stomp your feet
Rhythm is the way we quantize time into beats, measures, sections, songs. Or seconds, minutes, hours. The units are interchangeable.
Rhythm is a universal human ability. Some people think that dance predates walking on two feet.
Drums are tools to crisply mark time. They can also be tuned to play melodies.
Jazz musicians have compared the piano to eighty-eight tuned drums.
Transistor rhythm
Keeping steady time in your head requires total concentration. We’ve been hard at work finding mechanical ways to tell time since the dawn of history. Mechanical clocks are expensive, bulky and fragile. Electronic clocks are cheap, tiny and, so far, still fragile, but did I mention cheap? So now all of a historical sudden, everybody has a clock.
Drum machines are clocks that play drum sounds according to whatever pattern you program in, at whatever speed you want.
A lot of musicians don’t like drum machines. A bassist friend compares hip-hop to “James Brown played by robots.”
Drum machines made the leap to software a few years ago. Any computer or cell phone can turn into a drum machine.
These Are The Breaks
Drum machine beats are fun, but they can be sterile. In the late 1970s, disco DJs and reggae producers started playing drum breaks as extended loops, and then adding vocals or other samples on top. Hip-hop musicians turned the sample into the basis of a new art form.
Possibly the most-sampled drum break in the world is the Funky Drummer break, a section of “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” by James Brown.
Another widely-sampled drum break is the intro to “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin. The drums were recorded at the bottom of a stairwell and were slowed and pitch-shifted, making it impossible to re-create it live.
How to make a hot beat
Regardless of the tools you use to make them, all hot beats share certain qualities. They balance the predictable with the unpredictable. Here in the western world we like rhythm based on powers of two.
Playlist
James Brown - “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” and “Funky Drummer Bonus Beat Remix”
James Brown – “Give It Up Or Turnit A-Loose (Remix)”
Led Zeppelin – “When The Levee Breaks”
Marvin Gaye – “Sexual Healing”
Lil Wayne – “Let The Beat Build”
Kanye West – “Love Lockdown”
