| DRUM THINGS I remember in the early days of decent drum machines, or “DUMB machines” as a friend of mine used to refer to them, you were a wanker or a techno-head if you tried to use one in recording or live settings. Those horrible fuckers who thought they were REAL musicians (just about anybody who ever played a gig in front of at least five other people) looked down their noses at those of us who would use such a thing. People with drum machines no doubt also had inflatable sex dolls under their beds. So, consequently, drum boxes were mainly used by socially inept nerdy types who sat at home in their bedrooms under the covers with their primitive sequences and Casio keyboards making tapes of crappy techno-ish music to exchange in brown paper bags at dimly lit street corners with other social pariahs of like mind. I was one of them for a while. Of course it’s not so bad now, but I am talking here of the EARLY days, late 70’s, early 80’s, and all that. Times were hard back then. We didn’t have it nearly as good as bastards do these days with hard disk recording and digital newfangled gadgets. No, we made do with mere sticks and rocks and instruments that had to be TUNED and such like. People lost limbs trying to record their music. We may have had it bad but at least by damn we were MISERABLE. But I digress... And I’ll digress a bit more, as those of us who still bear the scars of battle often do. I remember once my band, Joe’s Nose (me and Pete Studtmann), was using a cheap Casio keyboard as a beatbox for one of our live gigs as we sometimes did. Some irate drunken fucker came up to the stage in the shitty pub we were playing and had a right go at me for “putting drummers out of work” and such shit. Like we were getting paid a lot of money for the gig or something. He was mental. But he scared me. The pure hatred of us in general and myself especially really seemed way over the top. I was sure he was about to bite me or something. But then in those days the general consensus was that if you played original music it was obviously because you weren’t good enough to play cover tunes. If you used a drum machine it was somehow an affront to the dignity of the audience. So there was a lot of anti-beatbox sentiment around. We would at times gladly use drummers, usually from other people’s bands when they weren’t gigging- something I highly recommend. They’re already good and are glad to sit in on some stuff other than what their band does. But if it was a crappy little free gig in some shithole bar in Kansas we would just drag out the horrible keyboard, press the SAMBA button, and we were away. It helped provide the feel we were trying to achieve. That of a cheesy, stupid, untalented punk band. It worked a treat. I’ve not really had many drum machines in my time. They have always been overpriced and generally complicated to use and I’ve always been a skint lazy bastard. Most of my equipment comes from pawn shops or some other second hand joint so my choices have been limited really. But there are sometimes treasures to be had in pawn shops because the fuckwits working there really don’t have a clue about musical stuff. The two drum machines among the few I’ve had that spring to mind are the Boss Dr220-A and the Dr550. The 220 was my favourite until it died a horrible death recently. It was so simple and basic and was really a fun tool to work with because it had only ONE of each sound, not like seventy different snares and a hundred different bass drum noises all with individual tone, pan and dweedle settings. It was a little grey rectangular mono thing with limited capability and little memory but it sounded great and was oh so easy to use. It didn’t waste my time setting it up and programming shit into it. I could get on with the more important business of writing, if you want to call it that, and recording my music. They used to be fairly plentiful and about the cheapest ones in pawn shops. Mine cost me something like 30 or 40 quid at the time, but recently I saw one for sale at nearly 90 pounds because it was a “classic”. Go figure. I stepped on mine one day and broke the little LCD screen so I couldn’t read it anymore. I got mad and flung it at the wall and it broke into several pieces and scattered around the room. Too bad. I really loved that little drum machine. Now those little 220’s are getting hard to find. At the time of this writing it seems that the average price for a pretty good drum machine from a pawn shop in London is somewhere around 100 quid. The 550 I currently have was had from a pawn shop in north London for, I think, 40 quid or so because it had no owner’s manual and the little battery door on the bottom of it was missing. I bought it because I used to have one a few years ago and still remembered how to use it. A drum machine without the book is bloody useless if you don’t know your way around it. This one’s a lot more complicated than the 220 but I can get on with it just fine. I also run it mono to keep things easy. Too many stereo tracks get way out of hand really fast. I’m a bit of a minimalist as far as that goes. I almost never use more than four tracks on a recording. Nothing I have at the moment goes stereo. I’ve only ever had cheap 4-track cassette decks so I’m used to it but I have recently had a little experience on computer based multitracks and they’re a million times better which is sort of sad, really, since only now have cassette based 4-tracks finally become cheap and good enough to deliver CD quality sound recording for poor skint fuckers like me. Still, tape is a sort of a 1930’s concept of recording and has had a bloody good run for the last few decades. But the newer computer based things are really far superior for quality of editing and things like that but you’ve got to shell out nearly a grand for a fucking computer to start with. But if you can find your way onto a computer I highly recommend the N-Track recording thing. It’s really easy to use and a demo of it can be found at the Hitsquad website for your perusal. And there’s some great drum stuff on computer these days and it’s fairly cheap and works really well, but I still like the little doodad that sits by my cheap amp. It’s just really handy. I hate to have to get on a computer very much. It’s so mindnunbingly dull to sit in front of the screen. Log off, live life. Back in the days of Joe’s Nose I met what I have often said was the best drummer in the world for me. His name was Chuck Pierpont and he was the drummer in a rockabilly band called The Marauders. He didn’t have a big monstrous kit, just the basic set-up, and he wasn’t all flashy wanker crap. But he must have had an ear for it or something. He got the best sound out of his kit and was an absolute pleasure to work with. He was unpretentious and never had to be told anything. I’ve always hated the heavy metal and jazz fusion type drummers. Well, not so much hate them, because I’m a big fan of metal and fusion music, but their style just didn’t work in my stuff. Chuck had his own particular style of drumming that just made me shit my pants. It was spot on what I wanted. It was like he was telepathic. He could also, if you wanted, just turn up at a gig with only a snare drum (picture the dark smoke-filled room, the lone diminutive figure appears in the doorway, rockabilly quiff and leather jacket silhouetted against the night sky, snare drum in one hand, sticks in the other, a smooth voice breaks the atmosphere- “Where’s the gig.”- and in steps...cue the music from The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly...CHUCK). He would be a better drummer on just that lone snare than anyone around. Anyway, the point of all this is that I almost always do the drum parts in my music by asking myself “How would Chuck do it?” and then programming my unworthy little beatbox as best I can to be like him. I don’t know where that bastard is now but if I ever win the lottery I’ll buy him a house with a recording studio in it and make him be my drummer sometimes when he’s not gigging with others. Of course, I still get shit from people for using a drum machine sometimes. It’s usually the purists who sort of think that if it isn’t solo acoustic guitar then it’s not really music. Fuck them. You shouldn’t be so narrow minded as that. I have to admit that a fair old lot of people really don’t like my music for any number of reasons, and sure I’d rather hear somebody say something NICE about me than anything mean, but I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that most people think my music is pretty crap for one reason or another and some folks just hate drum machines. Oh well. I know you can’t please everybody. But sometimes people just don’t seem to see that I’m not here to come up with music that THEY would like- I’m here to be a musician, and the most important person in that thing is ME. It’s what I do. So, mister dipshit muso wanker purist review bastard, you don’t like my cheesy drum machine? Well I quite get bored with somebody banging on a solo acoustic guitar and being all sincere and shit ALL THE BLOODY TIME. To me, that sort of thing gets old quick. There’s been far too much of that sort of thing where you’re not taken seriously in music unless you do it with a solo acoustic guitar. That’s fine with me when it’s done well, but too often a piece of really bad music will be given some legitimacy simply by virtue of the fact that some whinging prat gets all sincere and does a lo-fi recording and then suddenly people think it must be good because it’s so unpretentious. No, I’m sorry, it’s still just crap. Not a lot of people can get away with rough solo recordings. Those who can, like Frank Peck (KAW Tapes), are beautiful and rare but most people just sound like fools. Cave men with guitars. I guess they still think it’ll impress the birds or something if they whinge and strum a shitty guitar in a plaintive way. Bollocks. So anyway, if I use a drum machine it’s probably because I’m trying to keep my music from getting stale sometimes. I’m keeping it changing and interesting for ME, not you. |