These days, our understanding of “mechanical” drum machines has more to do with a 4×4 grid and whatever’s loaded up into it, or a drum sequencer playing back preloaded samples in a prearranged pattern. The potential for creating highly complex polyrhythms was staggering. In other words, it’s what would happen if you held all the keys on the Rhythmicon down at once. Here’s one full cycle of what it might sound like if all of those rhythms were played at once (according to their position in the overtone series, starting on C1 at 15bpm - where my nerds at?). This device starts with a fundamental rhythm and then, based off of ratios inherent to the overtone series (e.g., 1:2, 1:3, 1:4, etc.), produces rhythms twice as fast as the fundamental, and three times as fast, and four times, and so on, up to a multiple of sixteen. Henry Cowell asked Leon Theremin (yes, the inventor of the famed electronic instrument bearing his name) to help him create a machine capable of producing a host of rhythms, up to sixteenth notes, by a mechanical turning-wheel-and-key system known as the Rhythmicon. Humans first utilized mechanical technology to create rhythm machines back in 1932. What are the odds that a drum sound as stereotypically ’80s as the one found in Phil Collins’ “Take Me Home” or Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” would title a Kanye West album or provide the main instrumentation in Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen”? But owing to some mystical fake-drum alchemy, for nearly 40 years, the Roland series of 606s through 909s have managed to find relevance again and again. Yes, yes, whether you like it or not, the music we consume is predominantly set in time by that which we call the drum machine.Īnd while there are an infinite number of analog and digital drum machines on the market, most tend towards the ephemeral, finding favor among a few artists for a few years, before the sound becomes dated and the artists move on. But the beats we’re so consumed with, the sounds that so commonly drive our daily lives, are not only not the sound of a beating heart ( a robot heart, maybe), they’re not organic sounds at all. Ah, that classic beat, marching ever onward, familiar as the beat of our own hearts.
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