In a previous blog entry I mused about the impact of drum machines on musicians, specifically: how many musicians have lost work because of drum machines? How would we even begin to answer that question? How would we even measure what constitutes work? What records would we use to assess how much work was or wasn’t lost over the period of decades?
Let’s try a thought experiment to assess the situation. Let’s start by looking at top forty hits over a course of decades. This gives us a quantifiable, manageable data set through which to assess the situation. However, this data set is also so highly selective in that it does not begin to scratch the surface of the great variety of music that is out there that is not measured by the Billboard top forty.
That being said, in the interest of exploring the issue, let’s continue that thought experiment. Functionally speaking, when taking charts into account, drum machines have zero influence before 1969. when Robin Gibb’s “Saved by the Bell” hits #2 in the UK. I think it would be fair to say that during the next ten to 15 years drum machines remained somewhat of a rare novelty in terms of recorded music. It is also worth knowing that even when drum machines were used, they were at times used in addition to acoustic drum sets, such as in “Heart of Glass” (1978) by Blondie. Both “Heart of Glass” and “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins used both a Roland CR-78 drum machine and live acoustic drums.
Drum machines also began to play a role outside of mainstream pop and rock. Jazz visionary Miles Davis started using a drum machine live with his band in 1974, using percussionist James Mtume to perform the machine. “Rockit” (1983) by jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock not only used an Oberheim DMX drum machine, but also used percussion provided by turntablists Grand Mixer D.ST and Grandmaster Caz. In 1976, French Composer Jean-Michel Jarre released his album Oxygéne using a Korg Mini-Pops 7 drum machine. With this album Jarre was creating a vision of what an electronic / synthetic approach to making music could be. While other composers, perhaps most notably Wendy Carlos, Jean-Jacques Perrey, and Gershon Kingsley, Jarre was amongst the first of these pioneers to incorporate a drum machine.
As you may have gathered, I find the history of drum machines to be very interesting, and I am easily sidetracked. In the interest of having posts of manageable sizes, I will leave it here for now, and come back to the topic again soon.