Dancing to the Drum Machine

How Electronic Percussion Conquered the World

Dan LeRoy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781501367267
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501367281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Dancing 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 machines-and their weirder, wilder-sounding cousins-changed 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 others on their toes. They anticipated virtually every musical trend of the last five decades: sequencing, looping, sampling, and all forms of digital music creation. But the personalities beneath those perfect beats make the story of drum machines a surprisingly human one-told here for the very first time.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• About the Author
• Foreword: Timing Is Everything
• Acknowledgments
• 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 Machine Programming
• 10 Without Me, You Would Not Have Even Thought About 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
• Index
• Copyright Page