Even if you aren’t a drummer, the phrase “drum machine” likely conjures a few images in your mind. Maybe it’s a beat pad, some nebulous notion of “an 808,” or maybe some nonhuman automaton clanking away on a convoluted contraption, à la Rube Goldberg. Honestly, this last idea isn’t as crazy as you might think.
- Robot Rock: Ancient Automata & Imaginary Machines
- Let There Be Light: The Rhythmicon & the Beginning
- The Beat in the Machine: Wartime Innovation Redux
- From Experimental to Everywhere: A Turn of the Cultural Tide
- Emulation or Reproduction? The Deification of Digital & Why It Changed Everything
- Analog Underdogs: The Horseshoe Curve Problem
- Performance over Programming: Don’t Disturb This Groove(box)
Robot Rock: Ancient Automata & Imaginary Machines
Before his death in 1206, the engineer/inventor polymath Ismail al-Jazari would publish The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices — a compendium of inventions and proposals covering all manners of automated activity, many of which significantly exceeded the technological capabilities of the era. This book cemented al-Jazari as the forefather of numerous aspects of modern-day engineering, robotics, and mathematics. Interestingly, his work was greatly inspired by the writings of the Banū Mūsā brothers and their similarly titled Book of Ingenious Devices, as commissioned by the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, Iraq. Though the original book is lost to time, an Istanbul-held copy shows that they envisioned mechanical musical instruments, like a hydropowered organ and a proto-programmable, steam-driven flute.
Where al-Jazari takes up the gauntlet is imagining these technologies as a robotic band of human-like automata whose rhythms and patterns were determined by water flow between tanks. The interval of water flow could be adjusted but would remain consistent in its rate while the system used a form of hydraulic switching with pegs and levers to operate the percussive component. Effectively, al-Jazari — by way of the Banū Mūsā — had conceived of the earliest programmable drum machine.
Some 600 years later, Carl Frei produced street organs that featured multiple instrumental parts — including a percussion section — that were hand-wound to produce music mechanically. This ancient history probably isn’t what you came here to read (and rest assured, the fun stuff is coming), but it illustrates an important aspect of the electronic drum machines that would play such an integral role in musical and technological development: humans have envisioned automated rhythm composition for at least 1,000 years. Despite our ubiquitous access to technology and its role in music, it’s evident that music was written, performed, and disseminated across generations without any manner of electronic technology. Of course, the emergence of this very same technology would trigger an exponential explosion in creative development, radically changing the physical and conceptual ways in which we interface with sound.
Let There Be Light: The Rhythmicon & the Beginning
Leon Theremin — yes, the inventor of that theremin — deserves much more credit than he receives for his namesake instrument. While his techno-musical and scientific pursuits far exceed the scope of this piece, Theremin’s work on the Rhythmicon was the result of a commission by the avant-garde, early 20th-century composer Henry Cowell. Cowell wasn’t after just any old rhythm machine; he specifically wanted to generate rhythmic patterns that would otherwise be impossible to perform by a single person.
The development of the Rhythmicon continued Theremin’s lifelong infatuation with the interrelationships of sound, light, and motion. He utilized a series of spinning disks whose perforations would create oscillations as their rotations disrupted the beam of light contacting the internal photoreceptors. What resulted was a complex machine capable of impressive polyrhythms, built on the overtone series of a selected fundamental pitch, with each successive tone in the series increasing the speed of the rhythms produced. By contemporary standards, it elicited an interesting set of sounds, which was nonetheless rhythmically reliable, earning the Rhythmicon a debut in 1932 by famed Soviet composer, theorist, and onetime mentor of Theremin’s, Joseph Schillinger, at the New School in New York.
Once Cowell lost interest, the Rhythmicon all but completely faded into obscurity, but it demonstrated a unique, phenomenological capacity for what philosopher and sociologist Alfred Schütz dubbed “making music together.” It’s difficult to imagine that al-Jazari’s and the Banū Mūsā’s conceptions of machinated rhythms envisioned the active performance often felt as a product of human performers. Incredibly, brothers Otto and Benjamin Miessner — the latter known for having invented the electric organ — had been concurrently working on a similar device, even using the same name. Despite the Rhythmicon’s proverbial fall from grace, the smoldering embers of techno-musical innovation were slowly but surely stoked.
The Beat in the Machine: Wartime Innovation Redux
It would be almost a quarter-century before another contender would appear to take up the gauntlet of automated rhythm. Since Theremin’s venture, World War II had ended, giving way to the Cold War and accelerating countless arenas of technological development. Advances in computers, audio signal processing, synthesis, and mediums of physical recording led to many exploratory, interdisciplinary musical research ventures. Pioneering works by the likes of Pierre Schaeffer, Jacques Copeau, Rudolf Arnheim, Cowell, and Halim El-Dabh would lay the foundation for the musique concrète movement. Among their many pursuits was an interest in tape music — that is, using recordings on physical mediums to create new music, sometimes in the form of existing pieces or abstract, raw materials. In 1957, Iowa native Harry Chamberlin would produce the Chamberlin Rhythmate, an early drum machine that used tape recordings of drum parts to be recalled at will. This invention was meant to accompany the types of family sing-alongs and small group gatherings that Chamberlin’s namesake brand’s keyboards were designed to facilitate.
It’s difficult to overstate just how divisive this innovation was. The idea that someone wasn’t producing the sounds that were heard was a difficult pill to swallow, with similarly contentious debates occurring around the nascent synthesizers. Detractors claimed there was no talent involved, while supporters believed this was a new paradigm for music making that bore a responsibility to reimagine the artistic possibilities that the seemingly rapidly approaching future would demand. Chamberlin may have only sold around 100 total units of the Rhythmate, but his decision to utilize pre-recorded sounds would precipitate decades of musicological debate as synthesizers began to flourish.
The Wurlitzer Sideman, which debuted in 1959, was the subject of numerous controversies, including prohibitions of its use for dancing. Its variable RPM and simple, music box–like design made rhythms mechanically accessible and user-friendly, ultimately inspiring the Donca-Matic DA-20, thereby leading to the creation of Korg. As transistor technology grew drastically throughout the 1960s, pre-programmed, solid-state drum machines, like the Rhythm Prince and Select-A-Rhythm from Seeburg/Gulbransen, would emerge. Diode matrix circuits would broaden the scope of automated rhythm possibilities, as found with Ace Tone’s Rhythm Ace FR series, which included preset patterns and manually triggerable instrument sounds.
From Experimental to Everywhere: A Turn of the Cultural Tide
Drum machines continued to grow as brands like Hammond and Multivox licensed and incorporated designs from multiple brands, including Ace Tone. Slowly but surely, the music world was beginning to wise up to the creative potential afforded by drum machines. While the use of drum machines wouldn’t become commonplace until the 1980s, artists like Sly and the Family Stone, Robin Gibb, Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, and Osamu Kitajima would incorporate them into their works. Early innovators, like the Monaco-born Léo Ferré, even implemented them alongside symphonic compositions.
The Eko Computerhythm was released in 1972, invariably altering the machine-music landscape for a simple reason: it was programmable. Patterns could be entered manually, or punch cards could be used to perform pre-programmed rhythms. Regardless, the fact that rhythms could be customized and recalled was a marked step closer to the human-automata accompaniment envisioned centuries earlier.
As the ’70s progressed, the PAiA Programmable Drum Set and the Ace Tone Rhythm Producer FR-15 would enter the market, popularized by the new technologies that gave way to lower prices. PAiA sold their drum machine as a kit. Ace Tone founder Ikutaro Kakehashi would start Roland in 1972 and then BOSS in 1973. The former would release the first microprocessor-based programmable drum machine with the CR-78, while the latter would later debut a simpler, cheaper variant in the DR-55. As the decade ended, the world of synthesis was on a collision course with rhythm machines, and the emergence of a new form of audio technology would be so explosively influential that it would define virtually every aesthetic aspect of the 1980s.
Emulation or Reproduction? The Deification of Digital & Why It Changed Everything
Our contemporary understanding of synthesizers includes all manners of digital, analog, and emulation. Still, the ubiquity of technology allowing for such a wide array of sound-production choices obscures how radically digital sampling affected the musical landscape. Before the 1980s, synthesizers were often prohibitively expensive, and their analog architecture postured toward a sort of sonic purity bordering on the esoteric.
Though analog synthesis was used in the drum machines of the ’60s and ’70s, it usually meant high prices with little sonic flexibility. Digital sampling paved the way for entirely new subgenres of music to flourish, from techno and house to hip-hop, new wave, jazz fusion, and new permutations of rock/pop scenes. This gave rise to a specific issue of emulation: sounds clearly differing from their physical, human-performed counterparts. Ironically, many professional drummers feared they’d be put out of work, despite how clearly synthetic these drums sound now. Of course, the issue is a bit more complicated than that, but suffice it to say that the then-burgeoning world of widely varied, digitally sampled instruments suggested a vast leap could be made in replacing human involvement altogether.
And who do we have to thank for ushering in a new, techno-musical epoch? American engineer Roger Linn would revolutionize the music world with his LM-1 Drum Computer in 1980. Despite producing a mere 500 units, the LM-1 became a staple of not just the historical arc of drum-machine progress but also the 1980s altogether. Its digital sampling meant that the audio wouldn’t degrade (like with tape-loop drum machines), allowing it to produce far more lifelike drum sounds than its analog predecessors. Its namesake was derived from the respective last names of the company’s (Linn Electronics) founders: Roger Linn and Alex Moffett. Linn reported in a 2009 interview with The Guardian that TOTO keyboardist Steve Porcaro suggested recording real drum samples to a computer chip.
To our current-day, hi-fi-attuned ears, these 8-bit samples are, charitably, “cheesy.” Still, the difference between the LM-1 and the quality of the sounds of the drum machines that came before it was an entire order of magnitude. At least, that’s how it felt, especially with the LM-1’s introduction of swing rhythms, pattern chaining, quantization, and individually tunable onboard instruments. As time has illustrated, all early innovations come with a hefty price tag. In 1980, the LM-1 retailed for just under $5,000. That’s in 1980s dollars. Accounting for inflation, this equates to just over $19,000 in 2023. This might explain why early adopters ran the gambit of Phil Collins, Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, Jean-Michel Jarre, John Carpenter, and many others. Most notable was Prince, who almost exclusively used the LM-1 throughout most of 1999 and Purple Rain.
With the obvious boon that digital sampling offered to the artistic use of drum machines, it wouldn’t take long for others to iterate on the concept. The same year that the LM-1 was succeeded by the cheaper, more easily available LinnDrum, Tom Oberheim, in 1982, channeled his synthesizer expertise to produce one of the most pivotal instruments in hip-hop’s history: the DMX. Oberheim’s innovations in multi-voiced synthesis and programmability made his involvement the next logical step in the evolution of these instruments. Though the DMX housed many of the same features as the LM-1, it utilized 11 base samples to produce 24 different drum sounds with a maximum polyphony of eight voices. The DMX — which was pre-MIDI, like the LM-1 — could be synchronized with other Oberheim instruments via their proprietary Oberheim Parallel Buss interface, allowing for deep interoperative integration. It was also cheaper than the LM-1, as it retailed for $2,895 in 1982, equating to a formidable $11,288 in 2023. While bands like New Order and the Police were among the many new wave and adjacent acts to use the DMX, its popularity in hip-hop was so pervasive that it would be the source of inspiration for multiple monikers, including rapper DMX himself.
Regardless of the seemingly inescapable sonic presence of the DMX and the LM-1 — alongside their respective successors, the DX and LinnDrum — several other synthesizer heavyweights would try their hands at a drum machine based on digital sampling. Sequential Circuits (now just Sequential) had their MIDI-capable DrumTraks and TOM drum machines, while E-mu would utilize 12-bit samples with their Drumulator, and the Yamaha RX11 would feature deep editing capabilities across 16 base sounds.
Analog Underdogs: The Horseshoe Curve Problem
Eagle-eyed readers are undoubtedly anticipating what’s next. Even though digital sampling opened previously unimaginable horizons for sonic reproduction, Roland wasn’t ready to abandon their analog Ace Tone roots. In the same year that saw the digital deluge, Roland launched the now-legendary TR-808. Its analog sound engine meant two significant things. For one, it was much cheaper than its digital siblings, listing for $1,195 in 1980 (just under $4,700 in 2023). Secondly, it transformed the inevitability of analog’s limitations into a deliberate style choice. To put it another way, Roland chose to concern itself less with emulating “real drums” and more with creating a compelling, distinct instrument that would encourage a different manner of creative exploration, especially with the bourgeoning hip-hop, electronic, and dance scenes.
Because the 808 has become so ingrained in the cultural zeitgeist — like how its name is a stand-in term for any booming, bassy kick sound — it’s almost inconceivable that it was a commercial failure. Though it generated a cult following very early on — finding use in mainstream works from Marvin Gaye and Afrika Bambaataa to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and countless others — the cruel hands of fate halted its production. After producing around 12,000 units, the drum machine’s semiconductors were impossible to restock. Detractors criticized it for its lack of realism as the used market disseminated them throughout the various musical undergrounds, setting the stage for the 808’s ultimate cultural destiny.
Roland would try again in 1983 with the TR-909, blending digitally sampled sounds with analog synthesis. Designer Tadao Kikumoto allegedly sampled a mix of Paiste and Zildjian cymbals from his kit in 6-bit before digitally editing the waveforms. The 909 would be a commercial failure for the same reason as its predecessor: the drums weren’t real enough. Were low-bitrate audio samples of real drums somehow “more” real? An ontological debate for another time, but the 909’s commercial failure would nurture the nascent acid, techno, and Chicago house scenes, alongside another of Kikumoto’s designs: the TB-303 bass synth. The shorter life cycle of the 909 led Roland to accept the inevitability of digital sampling, ushering in the TR-707 only a year later in 1984.
Performance over Programming: Don’t Disturb This Groove(box)
As computer technology increased in availability and complexity, drum machines began to fall out of vogue — primarily because the user experience and limited application had become outmoded amidst the larger move to hybridize various technologies, tools, and sounds. Most drum machines didn’t lend themselves to being played in a live setting. Rather, they relied on programming grooves and patterns that, once set, would simply run on their own. The continued integration of technology into various musical spaces, alongside a continued trend away from analog synthesis, took the digital promises of the LM-1 to their logical conclusion: a sort of digital infinity. Samples that won’t degrade, new forms of synthesis, emulation that ultimately may perfectly preserve an indistinguishable digital replica of the analog sounds we love . . . forever?
Obviously, this wasn’t the actual state of things in the ’90s or the 2000s or even now but a philosophical proposition about the nature of sound and how we interface with it. It remains to be seen whether it’s a place we’ll reach, or a Platonic form we’ll forever approach, asymptotically. Grooveboxes embodied the promise of a new era of comprehensive music creation, blending sampler, sequencer, drum machine, and sound production into a single instrument that was, above all else, designed with performance in mind.
It’s an interesting debate of form and function. When most people think of grooveboxes, they imagine something in the style of an MPC: a 4×4 grid of buttons coupled with a slew of editing and interface options. When you extract the constituent parts from the design, however, you’ll find many configurations of synthesizers, sequencers, rhythm production, and so on dating back as far as 1972, when Electronic Music Studios (EMS) introduced the Synthi AKS, or 1973, when Buchla debuted its Music Easel. Both systems comprised touch-capacitive keyboards with analog synthesizers, housed in what was essentially a briefcase-style carrier. Grooveboxes from Yamaha, Korg, Roland, Firstman, Linn Electronics, and more would slowly homogenize throughout the 1980s, ditching the keyboard in favor of performance pads.
Akai, with Roger Linn at the helm, would release the MPC60 in 1988, crystalizing the archetype of the 4×4 arrangement for grooveboxes. As Akai continued to hone its golden goose, competitors like Roland, BOSS, Zoom, Korg, and Yamaha would spend the ’90s attempting to catch that same lightning in their respective bottles. Though their instruments have generated plenty of dedicated users and admirers — especially Roland/BOSS’s SP-303 — generations of MPCs would continue to wear the crown well into the 2000s.
With the 2010s on the horizon, home music production and its surrounding technologies had advanced so much that the historic market conventions of delineating the various types of musical functions and associated hardware were almost completely irrelevant. Concurrently, the proliferation of plug-ins, accuracy of software emulations, renewed interest in analog synthesis, and general infatuation with nostalgia, birthed from the limitless connectivity of the Internet, turned grooveboxes and drum machines into tools of style. Practitioners of both instruments have a solid case, too. You can conceivably sample anything through a modern DAW in much the same way as an MPC or Roland’s vaunted SP-404, but it’ll never have the same groove as its hardware counterpart. J Dilla’s Donuts, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….., Onra’s Chinoiseries and Long Distance — pick a track at random from any of these albums, and you’ll immediately understand how the groovebox defined their sounds.
To paraphrase philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, “The musical medium is the message.” And to that end, there’s something equal parts poetic and intriguing that so many of these classic drum machines can be purchased today in the form of software emulation plug-ins.
Ready to Get Hands-on with Your Rhythm?
If you’re looking to expand your musical repertoire, change up your workflow, or simply add new flavors to your percussive palette, then there are plenty of grooveboxes, drum machines, and plug-ins available to deliver a bona fide beat-crafting experience. While this article covers quite a few options, it’s far from an exhaustive list! Any one of our Sweetwater Sales Engineers would be happy to guide you toward the rhythm machine that’s right for you. Just call (800) 222-4700 today to get started!