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Looper's Delight
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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.