A chapter of Cold Technology, Hot Beats
Rhythm is the basis of all music, the scaffold from which the rest hangs. Steady timekeeping is very challenging and requires deep concentration. It’s much easier with a clock, metronome or drum machine. We’ve come to take these automated timekeeping devices for granted.
Drums and clocks
Drums are tools to regularly mark time. They can also be tuned to play melodies. Jazz musicians have compared the piano to eighty-eight tuned drums.
People have 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 extremely cheap and getting cheaper.
Drum machines
Drum machines are clocks connected to synthesizers that play drum sounds according to whatever pattern you program in, at whatever speed you want. The unearthly perfection of drum machine rhythm is alienating and cold to some people. A bassist friend of mine disparages hip-hop as sounding like “James Brown played by robots.” He’s right, but for me this part of the pleasure. My life is full of alienating technology and it’s only fitting that music reflect that.
It’s common to blend drum machines with human percussionists, balancing the cold of the machines with the heat of live unpredictability. Michael Jackson and Herbie Hancock have both used this strategy.
Drum machines made the leap to software a few years ago. Any computer or cell phone can be a drum machine.
Beat juggling and sampling
Drum machines aren’t the only way to make beats electronically. In the late 1970s, DJs and reggae producers started playing particularly hot drum breaks from records over and over to make extended loops, often adding their own vocals and other sounds on top. If you have two copies of the same record on two turntables, you can beat juggle, playing one record while cuing up the other, then switching and repeating. You can also record the drum break into a digital sampler and play it back on a loop automatically.
Hip-hop beatmakers and other electronic musicians have turned the sampled drum break into the basis of a new art form. Probably 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. It’s been used in literally thousands of songs.
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.
Using loops and drum machines to emulate human drummers sounds lame. The best electronic music relies on the uniquely uncanny quality of loops and drum machines in their own right. Some drummers consciously emulate the sound of programmed beats, like the Roots’ Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.
Playlist
- James Brown – “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two”
- James Brown – “Give It Up Or Turnit A-Loose (Remix)”
- Led Zeppelin – “When The Levee Breaks”
- Lil Wayne – “Let The Beat Build”
- Kanye West – “Love Lockdown”
