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Dancing to the Drum Machine: How Electronic Percussion Conquered the World
Dancing to the Drum Machine is a never-before-attempted history of what is perhaps the most controversial musical instrument ever 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 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.
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 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.
454 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 6, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 22, 2023
Great book about a fascinating subject. A very in-depth history of the electronic percussion with great insight from the people who helped pioneer it which highlights the respect these musical geniuses deserve. Inherently readable, this book introduced me to some great new songs and inspired me to get my own MPC to make my own tunes. An extremely interesting and well written book that's going to be a foundational text to a uni project on the history of the 808. Plus the cover is really groovy!
One thing that really lets the book down though is the constant typos and writing errors. Words are constantly dropped, repeated or misspelled throughout its entirety. One or two mistakes is forgivable, but the number that appear here make it so you're looking to see when the next one pops up. Even the final page contains one: I've never heard of a band called A Certain Rational!
One thing that really lets the book down though is the constant typos and writing errors. Words are constantly dropped, repeated or misspelled throughout its entirety. One or two mistakes is forgivable, but the number that appear here make it so you're looking to see when the next one pops up. Even the final page contains one: I've never heard of a band called A Certain Rational!
June 11, 2025
Alright, back to formatted music book reviews for this one.
By way of a verdict: it's quite good, I recommended it to others (and it got me to buy a CR78 emulation plugin). Its greatest success is its framing around a product, but this also contributes to the cheapness of its attention to the subjects implicated.
- Self-insertion: B, this is a relatively seamlessly-personed book, with the author providing compressed histories which we might call pseudo-transcribed, the content of the work clearly comes out of interviews, but they are processed down to very small, readable narratives. The content of the book comes out of an interview form which I'll call narrow questioning, that is he's most interested in framing subjects in their positions with relation to an external history. What's nice about this is that the history interested the subjects, in about 90% of cases; and the author saw fit to describe when the subject rejected that there is intrigue in this framing.
- Rigor, Sociology, Scoping: C. In a way, this is a book about industry, and it does a fairly good job of interacting with that industry. It's also a book about dance music and subculture, which are moreso sat on the bedside table while the author fixates on the frame of the product itself. In terms of active scope reduction, I'll render it without a value judgment that this book tapers rather sharply off to an end after the MPC60 and SP1200 (i.e. don't read this for discussion of rave culture, computerization, etc.), but dips its beak into a discussion of trap production; it's a 350 page book that does a very decent job of interacting with the 1980s.
- Captured Character / Premodernism: B. Ah, what will last to me here .. certainly the fact of 'Echo,' the drum machine in Echo & the Bunnymen. I really can't remember the band that named their drum machine 'Roland,' only to switch over to a DR-55 which they continued to call Roland (despite being a Boss product). There is a lot of affection, here, towards product. Every book to discuss UK punk in the period ~'78-'82 is blessed, as is every book to discuss Cab Voltaire, but yes, the rendering of early industrial music, here, works very well. I remember the description of the sound of The Blue Nile being wonderfully accurate. The tone is just effusive, infectious throughout the book - including a discussion with Gotye, which is all in a very friendly tone and yet renders the man as pretty artistically stunted by diving into the rabbithole of archiving drum machine product -, and I think the only chapter which really bucks the trend is about the downfall of the Linn corporation when Roger Linn switched all their production power to the Linn 9000. It's all very sanguine, but I think a bit bloodless, mostly for the fact that the subjects interviewed are almost universally commercial successes, people who won a specific gold rush within music production. To that end, I'll call it wanting in sociological terms. (Also: all the hip-hop writing in here is pretty spotless, but the parallel 'block party' cultures of Jamaican blues [in and out of Jamaica] or funk brasilia seem like very easy subjects that could've done well being broached, here.)
- Production Focus: B. I refer, in this rating, to the book's informativity about specific details of music production history. I really appreciated the writing about the SP1200 and the very early MPC series here, and the consistent focus on the effectation of drum sounds (that's- pitch/decay modulation of specific drum sounds when possible in a machine, routing of specific channels through stompboxes, etc.). There's still plenty of quarters left in the couch cushions, and again the complaint kinda stands that the book is framed - to the effect both of lucidity and of a slight superficiality - around the capabilities of machines, plus the small bits of functionality people imparted upon them. The attention given to the music can naturally be a little lacking, whether it be a typification of 80s futuromanic cheapness; something more eternal as in the case of DJ Shadow, Public Enemy, and Cocteau Twins; or the popular in-betweens.
By way of a verdict: it's quite good, I recommended it to others (and it got me to buy a CR78 emulation plugin). Its greatest success is its framing around a product, but this also contributes to the cheapness of its attention to the subjects implicated.
- Self-insertion: B, this is a relatively seamlessly-personed book, with the author providing compressed histories which we might call pseudo-transcribed, the content of the work clearly comes out of interviews, but they are processed down to very small, readable narratives. The content of the book comes out of an interview form which I'll call narrow questioning, that is he's most interested in framing subjects in their positions with relation to an external history. What's nice about this is that the history interested the subjects, in about 90% of cases; and the author saw fit to describe when the subject rejected that there is intrigue in this framing.
- Rigor, Sociology, Scoping: C. In a way, this is a book about industry, and it does a fairly good job of interacting with that industry. It's also a book about dance music and subculture, which are moreso sat on the bedside table while the author fixates on the frame of the product itself. In terms of active scope reduction, I'll render it without a value judgment that this book tapers rather sharply off to an end after the MPC60 and SP1200 (i.e. don't read this for discussion of rave culture, computerization, etc.), but dips its beak into a discussion of trap production; it's a 350 page book that does a very decent job of interacting with the 1980s.
- Captured Character / Premodernism: B. Ah, what will last to me here .. certainly the fact of 'Echo,' the drum machine in Echo & the Bunnymen. I really can't remember the band that named their drum machine 'Roland,' only to switch over to a DR-55 which they continued to call Roland (despite being a Boss product). There is a lot of affection, here, towards product. Every book to discuss UK punk in the period ~'78-'82 is blessed, as is every book to discuss Cab Voltaire, but yes, the rendering of early industrial music, here, works very well. I remember the description of the sound of The Blue Nile being wonderfully accurate. The tone is just effusive, infectious throughout the book - including a discussion with Gotye, which is all in a very friendly tone and yet renders the man as pretty artistically stunted by diving into the rabbithole of archiving drum machine product -, and I think the only chapter which really bucks the trend is about the downfall of the Linn corporation when Roger Linn switched all their production power to the Linn 9000. It's all very sanguine, but I think a bit bloodless, mostly for the fact that the subjects interviewed are almost universally commercial successes, people who won a specific gold rush within music production. To that end, I'll call it wanting in sociological terms. (Also: all the hip-hop writing in here is pretty spotless, but the parallel 'block party' cultures of Jamaican blues [in and out of Jamaica] or funk brasilia seem like very easy subjects that could've done well being broached, here.)
- Production Focus: B. I refer, in this rating, to the book's informativity about specific details of music production history. I really appreciated the writing about the SP1200 and the very early MPC series here, and the consistent focus on the effectation of drum sounds (that's- pitch/decay modulation of specific drum sounds when possible in a machine, routing of specific channels through stompboxes, etc.). There's still plenty of quarters left in the couch cushions, and again the complaint kinda stands that the book is framed - to the effect both of lucidity and of a slight superficiality - around the capabilities of machines, plus the small bits of functionality people imparted upon them. The attention given to the music can naturally be a little lacking, whether it be a typification of 80s futuromanic cheapness; something more eternal as in the case of DJ Shadow, Public Enemy, and Cocteau Twins; or the popular in-betweens.
February 28, 2025
A very enjoyable tour through the history of drum machines and the characters the created and used them to shape modern music. An easy read that was full of interesting tidbits and amusing anecdotes. The author definitely did his homework.
December 29, 2022
Amazing book that goes through the history of the drum machine. Introduces the musicians who created hits with just a drum machine and the inventors who created some of the popular or obscure drum machines. I found the book to be my favorite read and as a musician I admire the research and detail. This book will make both musicians and non-musicians want to try out a drum machine!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews