Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/17/84; site mhuxr.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mfs
From: mfs@mhuxr.UUCP (SIMON)
Newsgroups: net.music
Subject: Drum Machines - A Flame
Message-ID: <317@mhuxr.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-May-85 21:47:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: mhuxr.317
Posted: Tue May 14 21:47:27 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 15-May-85 01:26:48 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 36

I despise drum machines.

I don't mean drum synthesizers, these hexagonal contraptions that otherwise
look like regular drum kits, and more important, are played by real live
humans. I don't mean to flame electronic instruments in general either.
No, this flame is directed at these little boxes, into which some guru
programs a 6/8, say, and which continue to beat that 6/8 ad infinitum,
ad nauseam or until the power is mercifully cut off.

What is their purpose, beyond saving in recording session costs,
and squeezing life from the recorded product? Martin Williams
has argued convincingly in "The Jazz Story" that jazz, and by extension
music *is* rhythm. Static rhythm is almost a contradiction.
Music is never so alive as when it is created on the high wire of
flexible time. The greatest drummers, folks like Max Roach, Elvin Jones,
Tony Williams, Roy Haynes, are constantly varying their patterns,
shading ahead of the beat to push the melody, or laying back a
fraction in a relaxed swing. The role of the drummer is to
shape, mold, re-arrange Time and thereby determine the whole
feel of the music. Bad soloists may not be rescued by a good drummer, but 
it is always true that the best soloist will be sunk by a bad
time keeper.

Given the fundamental importance of lively Time in African influenced
music (this includes jazz, blues, rock, most American folk, a healthy
chunk of country, and indeed the crushing majority of music
played or listened to in America), and given that almost by definition
drum machines cannot respond to the dynamics of the music as it is
unfolding, what is their reason for existing?? Every piece of recorded
music I have heard that uses them sounds DULL, flat, uninspiring...
like something recorded by a machine, which in a very key sense,
it is.

I HATE THE DAMN THINGS!!!!!!!!!!

Marcel Simon