Boom, Tick, Clap: The Story of the Drum Machine
A deep, booming kick drum rolls out of a club sound system, so low you feel it in your chest before you hear it. A crisp handclap snaps on the backbeat, and a hissing hi-hat ticks away above. No drummer is anywhere in sight. The groove is coming from a small box of buttons and lights, and the crowd does not care in the least.
The drum machine began as a humble accessory for home organists, a way to add a polite bossa nova or waltz to living-room music. Within a few decades it had become one of the most influential instruments of the late twentieth century, the engine behind hip hop, house, techno and much of modern pop. Here is how a rhythm box became a revolution.
Early Rhythm Machines
The idea of automatic rhythm is older than electronics. One early electronic landmark was the rhythmicon, built around 1930 by Léon Theremin for the composer Henry Cowell, which could play complex overlapping rhythms that no human could manage. It was a remarkable experiment, but only a handful were made.
Commercial rhythm machines appeared in the late 1950s. The Chamberlin Rhythmate used tape loops of real drums, and the Wurlitzer Sideman of 1959, an electromechanical box with a rotating wheel triggering sounds, is often described as the first commercially produced drum machine. Through the 1960s, Japanese firms joined in: Keio-Giken, later known as Korg, produced the Donca-Matic, and Ace Tone, founded by Ikutaro Kakehashi, made the Rhythm Ace. These machines offered preset patterns such as rock, waltz, tango and bossa nova, and they were usually built into or sold alongside home organs.
Rhythm Boxes Go Pop
In the early 1970s some adventurous musicians took rhythm boxes out of the living room. Sly and the Family Stone used one on the album There's a Riot Goin' On (1971), and Timmy Thomas built his hit Why Can't We Live Together (1972) around an organ's rhythm unit. The machines sounded thin and mechanical compared with a real drummer, but that very quality gave records an intimate, hypnotic feel.
Kakehashi had meanwhile founded Roland in 1972, and in 1978 the company released the CR-78 CompuRhythm. Its microprocessor let users write and store their own patterns rather than relying only on presets. The CR-78 can be heard on many records of the period, most famously Phil Collins's In the Air Tonight (1981).
1980: The Linn and the 808
Two very different machines arrived around 1980. Roger Linn's LM-1 Drum Computer used digital recordings of real drums, so its patterns sounded far more like a studio drummer. It was expensive, but it was quickly taken up by major artists, Prince among them, and its successor, the LinnDrum, became a sound of 1980s pop.
Roland took the opposite approach. The TR-808 Rhythm Composer, released in 1980, generated its sounds with analogue circuits rather than samples. Its kick was a long, booming tone, its snare a crackle of noise, its cowbell and handclap unmistakably artificial. Many musicians at first found it unconvincing, and Roland stopped production after only a few years. Used 808s soon turned up cheaply, and that was exactly what put them in the hands of young producers.
The 808 Finds Its People
Yellow Magic Orchestra in Japan were among the early users, and in 1982 two records showed the 808's potential: Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force's electro classic Planet Rock and Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing. Hip hop producers embraced the machine's tuned, sustained kick drum, which could be stretched into a rumbling bass line. Miami bass, electro and, decades later, trap music were built on that sound. Kanye West's album 808s & Heartbreak (2008) even named itself after the machine.
The 909 and the Birth of House and Techno
In 1983 Roland released the TR-909, a hybrid that combined analogue drum sounds with digitally sampled cymbals and hi-hats, and one of the first drum machines with MIDI. Like the 808, it was not a commercial triumph at first, and it too ended up on the second-hand market.
In Chicago and Detroit, producers working with modest budgets made the 909 central to two new genres. Its punchy kick drum playing four beats to the bar, its sizzling open hi-hat and its sharp claps defined the sound of Chicago house and Detroit techno in the mid to late 1980s. From there those rhythms spread to Britain and Europe, fuelling rave culture and much of the dance music that followed.
Samplers, Grooves and Hip Hop Production
Hip hop pushed the drum machine in another direction. Sampling drum machines such as the E-mu SP-1200 and the Akai MPC60, developed with Roger Linn and released in 1988, let producers chop up drum breaks from old funk and soul records and rearrange them on pads. Their timing feel and swing settings became part of the music's identity, and the MPC grew into an icon of beat making in its own right.
From Hardware to Software
In the late 1990s the drum machine moved into the computer. Propellerhead's ReBirth RB-338 (1997) imitated Roland's classic boxes on screen, and the step sequencer of FruityLoops, later FL Studio, introduced a generation of bedroom producers to programming beats on a grid. Today digital audio workstations, apps and hardware recreations of the 808 and 909 sit side by side, and the original machines are collectors' items.
The Drum Machine Today
The grid of steps that once lived inside a plastic box is now one of the most familiar ways to make rhythm. Producers program beats on tablets on the train, teachers use step sequencers to explain rhythm, and classic sounds from the 808 and 909 appear in chart hits every week. If you want to try it yourself, HarmonyHub's free online drum machine runs in the browser with a 16-step grid and genre presets, and the BPM calculator helps when matching tempos.
A Machine With Soul
The drum machine was once dismissed as a replacement for real drummers. Instead it became an instrument with a character of its own, and the sounds that engineers considered failures turned into the foundations of entire genres. Its story is a reminder that musicians often find the most exciting uses for technology in places its designers never imagined.