Description
Book SynopsisDancing to the Drum Machine is a never-before-attempted history of what is perhaps the most controversial musical instrument ever invented: the drum machine. Here, author Dan LeRoy reveals the untold story of how their mechanical pulse became the new heartbeat of popular music. The pristine snap of the LinnDrum. The bottom-heavy beats of the Roland 808. The groundbreaking samples of the E-MUSP-1200. All these machinesand their weirder, wilder-sounding cousinschanged composition, recording, and performance habits forever. Their distinctive sounds and styles helped create new genres of music, like hip hop and EDM. But they altered
every musical style, from mainstream pop to heavy metal to jazz. Dan LeRoy traces the drum machine from its low-tech beginnings in the Fifties and Sixties to its evolution in the Seventies and its ubiquity in the Eighties, when seemingly overnight, it infiltrated every genre of music. Drum machines put some drummers out of work, while keeping oth
Trade ReviewDan LeRoy takes on a subject that could easily result in a dry, strictly-for-geeks read – the history of machine-rhythm - and turns out a juicy deep-dive that will appeal equally to the lay-person interested in the evolution of pop culture as to the gear-head and serious musician. What this richly researched and entertaining book shows is that far from dehumanizing and deskilling music, the drum machine depended on human imagination: the vision and dedication needed to create the technology in the first place, the ingenuity of amateur and professional musicians alike, as they struggled with these newfangled boxes and extracted magic from them. It’s a story that’s largely untold and LeRoy tells it with vivid clarity. * Simon Reynolds, author of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture and Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 *
Table of ContentsForeword by Nick Rhodes: Timing is Everything Prologue 1. From Boats to Babies: How Drum Machines Began 2. The Rhythm Aces 3. Beat Brothers: Sly Stone and J.J. Cale 4. “The Machines Are Fighting Back” 5. Teutonic Sonics: Germany and Programmed Rhythm 6. Turn the Beat Around: Eno, Disco and the Drum Machine 7. Our Drum Machine Could Be Your Band 8. The Drum Machines That Weren’t 9. Punch the Clock: The Joy and Pain of Drum Programming 10. Without Me, You Would Not Even Have Thought of Writing This Book 11. Give the (Electronic) Drummer Some 12. Inside and Outside the Box: The Linn Revolution 13. “Have You Seen This New Drum Machine?
Shit!” 14. 808 State 15. Hip Hop’s Electric Guitar 16. Worker Bees of the DMX 17. Destination Emulation 18. Mr. K’s Last Laugh 19. The Mammals Arrive: The Linn 9000 and the End of the Drum Machine 20. Computer Love 21. Time Out of Time
Appendix: I Am Echo Acknowledgments
