Re: Drum MACHINES

["Rick Walker" <looppool@cruzio.com>]

To me, the sampling revolution that has so influenced modern music in the 
last 25 years
has given us the potential to invent and discover new uses for sounds.

I'm a drummer and have been , this year, for exactly 40 years,  but I 
frequently resent the
hegemony that the drumset has had over world popular music for a long time.

The hippest thing about drum machines , to me, is to use sounds that 
AREN'T 
trapset drum sounds
so that we can have new and cool ways to experience grooving.

That's why I've been such a ceaseless advocate for the software program 
Fruity Loops (FLStudio Producers Edition
as it is now, more stately, referred to).    It has a drum machine 
interface 
that is really easy to use but you just direct
it towards any samples that you have on your hard drive and you can make 
anything be a drum machine.


Having also been a multiple percussionist all of my life I realize that 
one 
of the great things about the drum set is
that it has bass (kick drum) ,  middrange (snare drums, tom toms)  and 
treble (hi hats and cymbals) timbral components.

When, as an example,  I play with a folk or acoustic pop artist,  I will 
frequently use an instrument like a darbukka (dumbec)
or djembe as an ersatz drum machine...............substituting open tones 
for kicks,   slaps for snare drums and light,non-accented
strokes as hi hats.

Drum machines can do the same thing..................we can make ersatz 
drumsets up using our imagination,  some DSP processing
and some clever sound design (note:  tune sounds you have way up high or 
way 
down low and find new contexts for them in their
new stretched tunings).

To me the Timbral revolution in modern music is every bit as important as 
the Rhythmic revolution (one that was greatly accelerated by
the whole early 80's world beat movement that brought a lot of ethnic- and 
sometimes, obscurely ethnic, rhythmic and timbral influences into
Western pop music and jazz).

Synthesizers,  Sampling and radical DSP processing have really changed the 
sonic palette of modern music in ways I find very exciting as
a musician and a composer.

The problem with drum machines in their ubiquity, as I see it,  is that, 
like the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer,  90% of the people who use them
don't really get very creative with them.

Remember,   when you pat out a rhythm on your guitar with muted strings 
and 
loop it.............you are just creating a digital drum machine.
It may be more creative than pushing pattern 10a on a drum machine but 
it's 
the same thing:  a sample being created and sequenced
in real time.

The sadly lamented late Joe Zawinul said that a beautiful constructed 
Synthesizer patch is every bit as beautiful as a Stradivarius violin.
I actually agree with him.

With drum machines,  we just need to strive for the 'beautifully 
constructed'  part of that statement.

Program on and remember............................someone may not want to 
listen to your computer drum programming but
I don't like to listen to bluegrass, frankly (even the best there is). 
Both expressions of human creation are equally valid
and as such are music with a capital M.