Today in Tedium: A few years ago, I gave a writer with an interesting interest in the machinations of the Billboard chart a place to publish. As a fellow chart nerd, I was impressed with the work that Chris Dalla Riva had done to connect data with musical styles. (Not every pitch includes the line, “I spent the last 3.5 listening to and collecting data about every Billboard Hot 100 number one hit.”) His resulting piece, “The Death Of the Key Change,” remains one of Tedium’s biggest hits. Chris, meanwhile, has gone on to his own successful newsletter, Can’t Get Much Higher. Recently he wrote a book based on his years of research, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves, and it’s a truly special document of how data and music come together in one piece. With that in mind, I asked if I could excerpt a portion of the book—and I chose this bit, on the rise of the drum machine. It shows his approach—tying story, musical style, and data. Not every song can make it to the top of the Hot 100, but the ones that do tell a hell of a story. Anyway, I’m going to hand today’s Tedium over to Chris. His book comes out in November (pre-order on Bookshop or Amazon)—and it’ll make you a Billboard obsessive if you aren’t already one. — Ernie @ Tedium

Today’s GIF comes from a 1980 commercial for the Roland TR-808, the most famous drum machine ever made.

Don Lewis, shown in 2013 National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show, playing the Live Electronic Orchestra (LEO). Lewis faced protests over his instrument in the 1980s, which could effectively recreate the sound of a full band.

Forty-Seven Heartbeats Beating Like a Drum

When Don Lewis showed up for work at the Hyatt Convention Center in Oakland, California, in 1984, he was surprised to find picketers outside. Lewis was an engineer and musician who made a name for himself playing a self-constructed instrument called the Live Electronic Orchestra. Often shortened to LEO, the instrument united a Hammond organ with a variety of synths to create a futuristic sound and lively show. As he approached the convention center, Lewis assumed the workers were protesting the Hyatt. But then he saw their signs: “Non-Union Musician. Don Lewis, Unfair to Musicians Union, Local 6.” It was the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). They weren’t picketing the Hyatt. They were picketing him.

The AFM was a large union best known for orchestrating huge strikes in the 1940s that halted all recording. Lewis had had problems with the union for some time. It had previously admonished him for performing as a solo artist at the Claremont Hotel, a room that was supposed to adhere to a six-musician minimum. Lewis, a onetime member of the union, jumped ship for the National Association of Orchestra Leaders (NAOL), an organization more supportive of his endeavors.

Though the AFM has gone to great lengths to make sure working musicians get paid a fair wage, they have also been sluggish to adapt to new styles and technologies. Musician minimums, for example, were a relic of the idea that recordings damage those who perform live. The AFM viewed Lewis as a threat because his mastery of synths and drum machines made other bandmates unnecessary.

With the help of the NAOL, Lewis filed an unfair labor practice charge against the AFM, alleging that they were illegally trying to coerce him to rejoin their union. An administrative law judge dismissed the complaint in 1985. With his options exhausted, Lewis put LEO in storage and supported his family by other means. In 1992, the Ninth Circuit overturned the earlier decision, but it was too late to revive his live act.

Lewis’s story is an illustration of many things, one of which is how technological advancement can evoke apocalyptic fear. At every turn, from the invention of radio to the rise of digital sound to the proliferation of pitch correction, people have equated technological progress with musical destruction. But like our relationship with the past, our relationship with technology also changes.

Drum machines prove a good example of this. Though they initially faced backlash, they went on to be one of history’s most popular pieces of musical technology. Let’s get a sense of how this change happened.

The Korg Volca Beats drum machine, a classic example of the form. This device was first made in 2013, but is indebted to many earlier models, particularly the TR-808.

The Rise of the Drum Machine

In case it wasn’t clear, a drum machine is an electronic device that simulates the sounds of acoustic drums and other percussive instruments. In the image above, you can see my Korg Volca Beats drum machine. Though it’s more contemporary, it has similar functionality to those drum machines from this era.

Along the bottom panel of the device, there are 16 buttons, the first ten of which are labeled with the different sounds that the machine can produce: kick, snare, low tom, high tom, closed hi-hat, open hi-hat, clap, claves, agogo, and crash. I can program a beat by selecting one of those sounds and placing them on one of 16 beats. Using the knobs at the top, I can then adjust the overall tempo and volume, along with the tone of each drum.

And that’s sort of it. But with those basic tools, you can make everything from the straightforward beat you hear on Janet Jackson’s flirty “When I Think of You” to the alien rhythmic noises on Bananarama’s “Venus.” Drum machines didn’t always have this flexibility, though.

Drum machines of this era evolved from products often marketed to amateur organists. These devices came with presets like “samba” and “bossa nova” that made it easy for soloists to perform accompanied by rudimentary rhythms. Descendants of these presets are what appear on the first hits to use drum machines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, like Timmy Thomas’s “Why Can’t We Live Together” and Sly Stone’s “Family Affair.”

Everything changed in 1978, though. That’s when the Roland Corporation released the CR-78, one of the first drum machines that allowed people to program and save beats. The CR-78 colored some hits of the last two eras, including “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” by Daryl Hall and John Oates, “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins, “Heart of Glass” by Blondie, and “Eminence Front” by The Who. Roland soon replaced the CR-78 with the TR-808.

Released in 1980, the TR-808 is the most famous drum machine of all time. Its influence on hip-hop is often compared to the influence of the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson Les Paul electric guitars on rock music. But like the electric guitar, the 808 has touched most genres. You can hear it on everything from Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” to Usher’s “Yeah!” and Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” to Drake’s “God’s Plan.”

For many artists, the appeal of the 808 was that it didn’t sound like the traditional drum kit you’d hear on a sweaty rock record, like Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love.” It sounded different, or, as percussionist Remi Kabaka, Jr. said in the documentary 808, “larger than life … like it had come from Mars or something.” Those sounds had an otherworldly quality because they were produced through a process known as “analog synthesis,” meaning they were generated by electrical hardware.

The 808 stood in contrast to the LinnDrum, a more human competitor that was also popular in the 1980s. I say it was “more human” because the LinnDrum’s sounds were samples, meaning that when you clicked, say, the snare button on the device, you actually heard a recording of a snare drum. From Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls” to George Michael’s “Faith” and Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” to Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now,” these LinnDrum samples were everywhere in this era.

While understanding the evolution of drum machines is important because they are featured on so many hits of this era, it’s doubly important because their proliferation had subtle effects on popular music. First, the drum machine continued to entrench our obsession with 4/4 time. Again, 4/4 is your standard four-beat count that you hear on everything from Los Lobos’ “La Bamba” to Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” And while that count has been so prevalent for so long that it’s often called “common time,” two things pushed it from common to ubiquitous.

An example of the LinnDrum, one of the more prominent drum machines used in the 1980s. (Steve Harvey/Unsplash) First, the disco DJ. The proliferation of disco and DJs mixing music made common time even more common. The drum machine pushed it further. The LinnDrum and the TR-808, and even my drum machine, are all built around beats of four. Though you can make rhythms in other time signatures, the design doesn’t suggest so.

When I asked LinnDrum creator Roger Linn about this via email, he concurred: “Technology tends to influence art, so people tend to make the kind of music that the machines want to make. My early drum machines came with preset beats that reflected the music of the day, which was nearly all 4/4 … So, lots of people simply used the 4/4 beats that came with the drum machines.” In this drum machine-heavy era there were so few songs not in 4/4 that I can list them all for you: Tiffany’s piano ballad “Could’ve Been,” George Michael’s endless “One More Try,” and Billy Vera and the Beaters’ smoldering “At This Moment.”

The drum machine didn’t only influence the types of rhythms that were played, though. It influenced how those rhythms were played. Drum machines are naturally perfect. By that, I mean when the drum machine on Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” was programmed to play a beat at 117 beats per minute, it was going to play that beat perfectly until the end of time. As listeners and artists became used to that machine precision, human drummers began to play as rigidly. We can see this with some data.

For every song on Spotify, they not only provide an estimate of the tempo but also an estimate of how confident they are in that tempo. For example, they’re 67 percent confident that Madonna’s “Live to Tell” is 110 beats per minute, but 96 percent confident that her “Papa Don’t Preach” is 122 beats per minute. This makes sense. “Live to Tell” has a swirling synth introduction that is almost shapeless. “Papa Don’t Preach,” on the other hand, has rhythmic structure all the way through.

If we look at the songs on Spotify’s decade-based “All Out” playlist series (e.g., “All Out 50s,” “All Out 70s”), we can see how average tempo confidence has increased over the years. In the graph below, we can see that with the looser arrangements of the 1950s, average tempo confidence sits at 30 percent. By the 1980s, it’s more than doubled to 70 percent.

(Chris Dalla Riva) While part of this increase was driven by the proliferation of the mechanized rhythms of drum machines in the 1980s, it was also driven by human drummers trying to match that mechanized precision. If you compare Def Leppard’s hits from this era, like “Love Bites” and “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” to their music from the early 1980s, you can hear this. Rick Allen played drums throughout this entire period, but there is more looseness to his earlier beats. The same goes for Bob Seger. The troubadour’s hits from the 1960s and 1970s are much looser rhythmically than a late 1980s hit like “Shakedown.”

This change represented a fundamental shift in how popular music sounded. Given that it involved machines that could theoretically replace humans, it won’t shock you that the change also came with some controversy.

An example of a modern drum machine. Older machines were way more complex than this. (hurricanehank/DepositPhotos.com)

Why You Shouldn’t Fear the Drum Machine

In 1984, the CBS Evening News produced a segment on synthesizers and drum machines. Here’s how anchor Bob Schieffer introduced the story: “The next time you hear a drum beating or a violin playing, it may not be a real instrument at all. You might be listening to computer generated sounds from a synthesizer.”

Schieffer then passes the report to Sam Ford. The camera pans over an orchestra as Ford narrates: “Much of the music was coming from a machine called a synthesizer and that has many musicians worried … Many professional musicians are so concerned these musical robots are taking jobs, unions are negotiating labor contracts prohibiting synthesizers from displacing traditional instruments.”

The camera then cuts to Victor Fuentealba, the president of the AFM. Fuentealba’s tone is apocalyptic: “They keep refining these devices to the point you can’t tell the difference between the electronic device playing the instrumental part and the instrumental part being played by the live musician.”

Fuentealba is expressing the same sentiment that James C. Petrillo expressed during the AFM strike that we discussed in Chapter 2. New musical technologies will destroy the lives of working musicians. In Petrillo’s case, that technology was radio, records, and jukeboxes. In Fuentealba’s case, it was synthesizers and drum machines. To a degree, both men were correct. These technologies did put musicians out of work. But that doesn’t account for the fact that these technologies also transformed music.

The music industry of the 1980s was much bigger than that of the 1940s. Part of the reason for that was because artists embraced technologies that made it easier and cheaper to make music. You can get a sense of this by talking to some of the people who pioneered drum machine technology.

Roger Linn, the aforementioned creator of the LinnDrum, told me that part of his motivation was to help with the songwriting process: “When writing songs or simply jamming, it’s helpful to have a drumbeat playing … [Producer] Giorgio Moroder once told me that before my drum machine, he would record a drummer playing a simple beat continuously for about 20 minutes, then play it back to write to.” Clearly, Moroder put this technology to good use. Along with producing a handful of hits for Donna Summer, he cowrote and produced Blondie’s “Call Me,” Irene Cara’s “Flashdance . . . What a Feeling,” and Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away.”

And what about Don Lewis? He told me that he started his career playing the organ at a bar in Denver. Because there wasn’t enough space for a percussionist, Lewis used the organ’s built-in drum machine as accompaniment. An engineer, Lewis rewired the machine to play beats beyond the presets.

Later, while working as a salesman for the Hammond organ company, Lewis continued to utilize drum machines to improve his sales pitch. It was through this job that he met Ikutaro Kakehashi, the head of Ace Tone, a company that made drum machines for organs. Kakehashi was impressed by the modifications that Lewis made to his machines, and the two became fast friends. In 1972, Kakehashi formed Roland and hired Lewis to help work on the first programmable drum machines.

So, while artists worried that drum machines were destroying jobs, Lewis’s interest in drum machines grew out of necessity to do his job. He continued to use them because he loved the sounds they made. To quote producer Quincy Jones in a documentary about Lewis’s life, “[We] kind of rode technology all the way. These things changed music. To me, it was never an attempt to displace a musician or replace a musician. It was just another instrument and color in the orchestration.”

Many of Jones’s productions with Michael Jackson in this era, including “Bad” and “The Way You Make Me Feel,” utilize a traditional drummer and a drum machine. U2’s “With or Without You” does the same thing. It starts with a dreamy, programmed beat before drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. arrives during the song’s climax.

These examples illustrate not only how programmed beats can be complementary to traditional percussion, but how technology can grow rather than shrink the music industry. That doesn’t mean that every programmed beat makes for good music. Kim Wilde’s cover of The Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” isn’t as powerful as the original because the drum machine sucks the life out of it. But bad songs aren’t enough to deny the fact that drum machines and synthesizers helped the music industry grow to new heights.

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Thanks again to Chris for sharing an excerpt from Uncharted Territory. (I plowed through the whole thing in like a day!) If you want to learn more about chart-topping songs and the culture that created them, pre-order the full book on Bookshop or Amazon.

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