Dancing to the Drum Machine: How Electronic Percussion Conquered the World
Ebook
Overview
Dancing to the Drum Machine is a never-before-attempted history of what is perhaps the most controversial musical instrument ever invented: the drum machine. Here, author Dan LeRoy reveals the untold story of how their mechanical pulse became the new heartbeat of popular music. The pristine snap of the LinnDrum. The bottom-heavy beats of the Roland 808. The groundbreaking samples of the E-MUSP-1200. All these machines-and their weirder, wilder-sounding cousins-changed composition, recording, and performance habits forever. Their distinctive sounds and styles helped create new genres of music, like hip hop and EDM. But they altered every musical style, from mainstream pop to heavy metal to jazz.
Dan LeRoy traces the drum machine from its low-tech beginnings in the Fifties and Sixties to its evolution in the Seventies and its ubiquity in the Eighties, when seemingly overnight, it infiltrated every genre of music. Drum machines put some drummers out of work, while keeping others on their toes. They anticipated virtually every musical trend of the last five decades: sequencing, looping, sampling, and all forms of digital music creation. But the personalities beneath those perfect beats make the story of drum machines a surprisingly human one-told here for the very first time.
The never-before told story of drum machines, from their primitive beginnings to their Eighties dominance to the ways they’re still changing music today.
The author wrote The Beastie Boys’ Pauls Botique, which has sold nearly 11,000 copies to date and is the #5 bestselling book in the 33 1/3 series
Drum machines are the most influential development in popular music that has never (yet) received a book-length treatment
Understanding the drum machine is a vital component of understanding nearly any form of popular music
Foreword by Nick Rhodes: Timing is Everything
Prologue
1. From Boats to Babies: How Drum Machines Began
2. The Rhythm Aces
3. Beat Brothers: Sly Stone and J.J. Cale
4. “The Machines Are Fighting Back”
5. Teutonic Sonics: Germany and Programmed Rhythm
6. Turn the Beat Around: Eno, Disco and the Drum Machine
7. Our Drum Machine Could Be Your Band
8. The Drum Machines That Weren’t
9. Punch the Clock: The Joy and Pain of Drum Programming
10. Without Me, You Would Not Even Have Thought of Writing This Book
11. Give the (Electronic) Drummer Some
12. Inside and Outside the Box: The Linn Revolution
13. “Have You Seen This New Drum Machine? Shit!”
14. 808 State
15. Hip Hop’s Electric Guitar
16. Worker Bees of the DMX
17. Destination Emulation
18. Mr. K’s Last Laugh
19. The Mammals Arrive: The Linn 9000 and the End of the Drum Machine
20. Computer Love
21. Time Out of Time
Appendix: I Am Echo
Acknowledgments
Dan LeRoy takes on a subject that could easily result in a dry, strictly-for-geeks read – the history of machine-rhythm - and turns out a juicy deep-dive that will appeal equally to the lay-person interested in the evolution of pop culture as to the gear-head and serious musician. What this richly researched and entertaining book shows is that far from dehumanizing and deskilling music, the drum machine depended on human imagination: the vision and dedication needed to create the technology in the first place, the ingenuity of amateur and professional musicians alike, as they struggled with these newfangled boxes and extracted magic from them. It’s a story that’s largely untold and LeRoy tells it with vivid clarity.
- Title: Dancing to the Drum Machine: How Electronic Percussion Conquered the World
- Author: Dan LeRoy
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2022
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 336
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781501367281, 9781501367267, 1501367269, 1501367285
- Resource ID: LLS:9781501367281
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:07:47Z
Dan LeRoy is the Director of Writing and Publishing at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School, USA. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The Village Voice, Esquireonline, and Alternative Press. He is the author of The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique (Bloomsbury 2006), The Greatest Music Never Sold (2007), For Whom the Cowbell Tolls (2014), and Liberty's Lions: The Catholic Revolutionaries Who Established America (2021).