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Re: OT: Drum machines vs. Human beings



Great post Rick!  I too love the juxtaposition.  Thanks for the history 
lesson as well.  Also loved your post on 'why... looping festivals'.  Very 
inspirational.....and makes marketing sense too.

As far as beats go, I rely on my brother Chris who is a great drummer 
imho, 
but he's in LA and I'm in Vancouver.  We have a semi dormant project 
called 
Idiot Bliss.  When I play, I am accompanied on some pieces by his looped 
beats, played from my laptop.

Anyway, please excuse the promotional spammage, but he has a new drum 
sample 
CD out through Ilio. FYI the CD is 'Stark Raving Beats'.

http://www.ilio.com/ilio/srbeats/index.html

Finally, yes I'd love to know more about programming tricks. I am a 
guitarist afterall :-)

Terry O'Brien
www.anomalousdisturbances.com


>From: "Rick Walker/Loop.pooL" <GLOBAL@cruzio.com>
>Reply-To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
>To: "Loopers Delight" <Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com>
>Subject: OT: Drum machines vs. Human beings
>Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 23:07:06 -0700
>
>Dave wrote:
>"Years ago I read an interview with Stan Ridgeway, then still with
>Wall of Voodoo, where he said that drum machines ought to sound like
>appliances. I liked that. If you want human feel, get a human! "
>
>I laughed at this quote!    There is a place where I agree.
>
>I have been a professional drummer and multi-percussionist all of my adult
>life and am constantly besieged
>with questions about both drum machines, sequencers and looping
>devices............."Aren't you afraid of
>putting musicians out of work"  These are my thoughts about this sort of
>question and my feelings about
>drum machines in general.
>
>
>Just for a little historical perspective:
>
>  Shortly after the turn of the century, when the Secretary of the Navy
>prevailed upon the mayor of New Orleans
>to shut down the Red Light district (for upright moral reasons), whose
>Madams had been the financial backers for  the new music
>that many white people were calling 'Jazz'  (a term which is synonymous 
>with
>Sperm or Gism or Jizz),
>they first tried to put pressure on the houses of ill repute by using
>housing code
>violations, trumped up 'disturbing the peace' violations and the many 
>other
>ways that cities have of hassling
>musical establishments (and it continues to this day, bless their pointed
>little heads).
>
>Anyway,  as the sailors began to drift away from the port of New Orleans
>(where the navy had disbanded leaving hundreds
>of marching band instruments----drums and brass instruments, primarily 
>whose
>prevalence and , hence, cheap prices had fueled
>the early jazz musicians) and the finances started to drain out of the 
>area
>(sound familiar dot.com busters in the S.F. bay area?)
>the Madams were forced to start hiring smaller and smaller bands to play
>jazz at their establishments.   Also, many musicians
>started heading up the Mississippi to look for work in places like 
>Memphis,
>Kansas City, Chicago and eventually, New York
>and Los Angeles causing the spread to the rest of the country of both jazz
>and blues.
>
>At the time, the de rigeur rhythm section consisted of either a bass 
>drummer
>and a snare drummer or
>a bass drummer, snare drummer and cymbal player, which were the classical
>drumming units in a Navy marching band.    As the 12 piece orchestras 
>became
>10 piece and 6 piece and finally 3 and 4 piece bands (the 'typical' jazz
>band size of today), some enterprising young black man (and I have never
>found anybody to say who it was specifically in all the 1st hand accounts
>and histories of jazz and drumming that I have read, which is a lot)  came
>up with a 'contraption' that allowed him to play the bass drum with  his
>foot and play the snare drums with both hands (because it was now on a
>stand)..........it took 8-10 years later before another person (again,
>nameless, to my knowledge) before another young black drummer added to the
>contraption (which had
>, by this time been shortened to the term 'Trap Set'----a contraction of
>contraption, as it were) by putting two cymbals together
>with a pulley mechanism to form the first high hat (although the original
>ones were not "High Hats" at all, but "Low Bows" or
>"Sock hats" because the cymbals were at the level of the drummer's
>socks--------it took another few years for some one to
>raise the heighth of the tube supporting the now named "Hi Hats".
>
>In this way, the original 'contraption' inventor reduced the job of two or
>three drummers and the budding 'Drum Set' and it's importance in the
>original jazz ensembles was born.
>
>Imagine what would have happened to the history of modern music if that
>person had heeded the question,  "Aren't you
>afraid that this invention will put musicians out of work".
>
>Innovation occurs..............people are always looking for better and
>better ways of getting the music in their heads out into the world.
>it is a never ending process.   As a young man, I remember a producer
>telling me "You can bitch and moan about the
>proliferation of drum machines in recording studios, Rick, or you can 
>learn
>how to program them so you will always have work".
>
>Well, from the time that I first saw the band Ultravox play with a trapset
>player with only a bass drum, snare drum and cymbals
>(wierdly minimal in the era of 10 tom, concert drum sets which were de
>rigeur at that time (late 70's) and Roland CR78, which was
>the first official primitive 'programmable' drum machine, I was 
>transfixed.
>I love the juxtaposition, timbrally, of the heavy drums and the artifical
>and light sounding analogue drum machine sounds............I thought it 
>was
>really beautiful and it changed my life.    I through myself into the 
>world
>of what I call hybrid drumming:    real drums, percussion and either drum
>machines or triggered samples.
>
>Early on I discoverd that if I put an old Synare trigger on my kick drum 
>and
>then made the note as low as I could make it but
>shortened the envelope so that it was almost inaudible, that I could make 
>my
>kick drum sound like GOD and still have all the punch
>and attack and human nuance of a reall drum (which it was).
>
>Well,  since then I have consulted and provide samples for EMU (I've heard
>that my famous one headed kick drum tuning is the most used drum in their
>sample library which makes me proud),  I've helped them choose sounds (the
>EMU Carnaval and the EMU
>Phatt) and I've programmed preset rhythms for the ZOOM 123.   I've also 
>done
>a tremendous amount of programming for
>musicians who feel like they just don't know how to program drum machines
>realistically (boy, can I tell when most guitarists or keyboardists 
>program
>their drum machines).  As a matter of fact, tomorrow, I will be 
>programming
>an old Roland TR505 for
>a steel drum band that does work teaching music to children in
>schools...............they can't afford to hire a reall drummer
>for their shows but they want their valuable tithing work to the community
>to continue (and, lo and behold, a drummer will be
>earning a little bit of money to program the machine with conciousness!!!
>
>
>As a matter of fact, if any one is interested in this very off topic 
>chain,
>maybe I could show you guys some great tricks for
>programming drum machines in the most simple and effective ways for your
>music.   Just let me know if anyone is interested and I"ll post these 
>tricks
>when I have time.
>
>So, personally, I love electronic sounds and old analogue drum machines
>because they are specifically not in the tonal range
>of the drum set and percussion playing that I do.      I also am really
>deeply into a kick lately to try and invent acoustic
>instruments that sound as if they were electronic or processed and then 
>loop
>and process them.
>
>I feel like the companies are trying as hard as possible to make their 
>drum
>machines sound realistic and I'm heading in the opposite
>direction................I guess I just dig the "NEW".    I'd be happy to
>talk about some creative ways for looping drummers
>to create new timbres for their acoustic drums that sound like they are 
>on 
>a
>Portisehead record or whatever.  Again,  just let me
>know.
>
>The human being is so complex that the drum machine companies don't have a
>bat's chance in hell of truly duplicating
>the 'real' thing..............It is the artificiallity of the drum 
>machine,
>ironically, that draws me to them..............I love the juxtaposition
>of the highly processed and articificial and the extremely primal and 
>human
>and idiosyncratic natural.
>It is, after all,   the world we find ourselves in today!    Part of our
>existence here in this culture has to do with reconciling
>the modern/technological/computer driven and automated aspects of our
>culture with the urge to just bang on a tree trunk
>or pick at a piece of gut stretched over a gourd.     I say,    RECONCILE 
>it
>all!!!!   It's who we are anyway, n'cest pas?
>
>So we come full circle (if you haven't fallen asleep yet---------------boy
>am I long winded sometimes--------LOL) to
>Stan Ridgeway's comments about drum machine that should sound like
>appliances............
>
>towards that end, I have a new piece on my next abstract electronica CD,
>'Purple Hand' which I'm hoping to have finished by late summer and early
>fall where I took a $60 sampling Casio watch and drove around the bay area
>(to looping gigs, I might add...:-)
>and sampled really cool cash registers that I heard................it came
>out great............hope some of you get to hear it at some point.
>
>yours, in looping and drumming and the love of drum machines.
>
>Rick Walker (loop.pool)




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