Going Back While Moving Forward

 

I've been putting together a third Pro Tools station for our studio.  The new publishing company means more writers on the property, which will inevitably mean more people needing studio time.  I've really thrown myself into it.  Wiring it up, bringing order to it.  Reminds me of years ago when we'd move into a new apartment or rental house.  I'd stake out a space and put together my studio -- even if it was a closet.  For years my gear was a cassette recorder, acoustic spinet piano, #2 pencils, manuscript paper, a wire bound notebook, and a pencil sharpener (and yes, I have put the spinet in a closet before).  

I created a lot of music that way.  At any time, any era, the music creation formula is still the same: imagination + vox/instrumentation = music, either gone forever, memorized in the mind and muscles, or stored in some sort of archival/retrieval system, like a cassette recorder or a piece of manuscript paper.  It's okay, you can ask what a cassette or manuscript paper is.  They were just tools and tools are only as good as the imagination and talent behind them.  As soon as I could I moved on to new ways of capturing ideas and performances.  But if there's ever an amazing musical idea being floated in the midst of a power failure, I'm your man, because I can write it down with a pencil and paper.  That's real analog there.

In the process of putting the new rig together I got the notion to add a little drum machine to the mix -- make it easy to get a beat going and put down a demo.  So much production happens in the DAW box in front of a computer screen now that music sometimes loses it's physicality.  I didn't want to just add Reason, Stylus, or EZdrummer to the computer.  I wanted to hit something -- with my forefinger.  Who would have ever thought that playing around with a drum machine could ever be described as visceral.  Well, I guess I did.  I used to be quite enamored of programming with sequencers, drum machines, analog synths, and so on.  From 1982 to 1992 nearly every record I played on or produced was of the programming variety.  A lot of that stuff is so marked by the decade it was created in that it sounds almost kitschy, disposable, and insincere.  Maybe that's the sound of the eighties, I'm not sure. But that was the time and the nature of so much pop music then -- especially radio driven music.  Thankfully, we've been back to live drums for a long time now -- though the use of sound replacement makes the nuance of playing live sort of a wasted effort for the drummer.  

I knew I wanted an Akai MPC machine and I settled on the little guy, the MPC 1000.  Bought it used on eBay of course.  Put an 80 gig hard drive in it -- one I had leftover from a MacBook Pro upgrade, and off I went, back to the future.  The first drum machine I ever used, besides one of those cheesy rhythm boxes, was a Linn LM-1 Drum Computer created by Roger Linn and introduced in early 1980 (pictured above). This machine was the first to use real drum samples and cost over $5,000.  Linn also created the MPC, but much later.  Legendary record producer/manager David Rubinson* got hold of one for his studio, The Automatt in San Francisco.  It might of been a prototype.  Producer David Kahne** learned to use it and we put it on several of my earliest recordings from 1980 featuring Vicki Randall (Tonight Show) and Mark Isham (film composer).  

I'm putting several drum kits together for the MPC 1000 made up mostly of Steven Slate samples and fave samples from years of production.  It will be simple and mostly something to write with and propel the demo process forward.  Still, I have to admit, programming the old way is pretty fun.  No wonder hip-hop has stayed so loyal to the MPC line of drum machines.  I get it.  Hitting that grey rubber pad is way better than auditioning one more loop in Pro Tools.

it remains to be seen whether this new little box will make its way onto any new recordings or not.  There's a part of me that wants another shot at programming -- a shot of redemption maybe.  It will have to be different this time though, but how can it not be?  It's a far more sophisticated world now. In the 80s we were all too young to understand that every tool has an ideology, one overriding goal more than any other -- like the hammer and its desire to drive the nail.  The heart and mind, the senses, must control the tool and moderate it's presence in the mix of choices.  In short, the drum machine works for you, you don't work for it.  Wish I would have known that in 1983.  You might still be listening to my debut album if I had.

 

* David Rubinson provided me with management and artist development in the very beginning of my recording career.  He is a San Francisio legend responsible for Moby Grape, Taj Mahal, Santana, Tower of Power, Herbie Hancock, and the Pointer Sisters. David worked as an Associate Producer at Capitol Records during 1963-4. He was with Columbia Records as a staff producer from 1964-69, after which he went into partnership with Bill Graham in The Fillmore Corporation in San Francisco. He formed David Rubinson and Friends Inc. in 1971 and five years later, built The Automatt, first automated studios in San Francisco.  He retired from record production in 1983. 

** David Kahne was the first record producer I worked with who modeled the record producer as philosopher/intellectual and student of popular music history.  In 1980 producer David Kershenbaum signed me to a development deal at A&M Records.  David Kahne produced the demos as well as subsequent demos during 1980-81.  David is a Grammy-award winning producer of such diverse artists as Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett, The Bangles, Sheryl Crow, Shawn Colvin, and Kelly Clarkson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linn_LM-1

http://www.vintagesynth.com/linn/linn.php

Comments

[Matt Kees]

Charlie... have you played w/ Addictive Drums? I really like the sounds (4 kits), samples, flexibility w/ fx, mic placement, etc...

i really like it because i don't have the facilities to record live drums at my studio - it's mostly a post-production studio... project studio... but Addictive Drums sound amazing... and they are so pliable... realistic... but you can also tweak them to be synthetic... so cool. Still requires some thought and creativity when selecting the kit, the room, the fx, everything...

thoughts?
you can hear some samples on my tunes... do they sound real to you? does it matter?

[Craig]

Charlie, did you see this piece in Gizmodo on Moby's drum machine collection? The video's pretty interesting.

http://gizmodo.com/5431693/moby-gives-a-tour-of-his-incredible-drum-machine-collection?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+gizmodo%2Ffull+%28Gizmodo%29

Blog's looking good.

[Charlie Peacock]

Matt, I definitely heard of Addictive Drums but have not tried them. Will give them a look-see and hearing soon. Thanks for the tip. BTW, "real" is relative to taste and context but never practiced outside of culture or history. That's the whole critique of the early drum machines. I can tell you that we all exclaimed how real they sounded. This was a huge reason why we felt set free to use them. We did not perceive them as fake but rather more an ideal of what we were looking for with drums during that time in pop music. The drum machines actually changed the way drummers play. More on that another time.

[Charlie Peacock]

Craig, thanks for your help last night. And yes I've checked out the Moby collection. I've got about 1/3 of that. I sold a lot of mine once I learned that the same drum machine was used by many different brands. That is the guts of the machine would be the same but bear a different brand like Korg or Baldwin etc. Cool pic though. I actually had a whole poplar cabinet built for my collection. I have a sticker on the case that says Drum Machines Have No Soul -- but I have the word No crossed out.

[Keith Smith]

I've always wondered if I should get an MPC for my setup... doing a lot of pop stuff these days and I've always hoped it'd be like my preference for hardware synths rather than software instruments. Hmm. You've got me thinking :)

[Reid Davis]

This reminds me of a 2,000-word soapbox sermon (or op/ed, most likely) I have brewing in me and might foist on the world one day, whether it likes it or not: "Gated-Reverb Drums, And The Great Records They Unnecessarily Ruined."

Tongue only SLIGHTLY in cheek.

On the other hand, the downtuned 808 kick drum still blows me away, after all these years. As OutKast said: "but I know y'all wanted that 808 / can ya feel that B-A-S-S bass."

[Reid Davis]

(And I thought the Vintage Synth site was my little secret. Obviously not. Ha.)

Just sign me...

One-time owner of a Korg Poly-800, Roland TR-707 and Casio CZ-5000 -- none of which helped! I now write about music and occasionally play my M-Audio USB keyboard in GarageBand and Ableton Live just for fun, crafting ditties no one will ever hear. ;-)

[Bruce]

I still remember getting a 3-track 3M machine and thinking, "Lord have mercy, whatever will I do with those other two tracks!"

Great blog, Charlie!

[Don Chaffer]

I keep having this conversation with a mix engineer friend of mine, Chuck Zwicky, in NYC, about how the tools DETERMINE the music, in subtle ways at least, but more often in profound ways.

I visited Chuck at his apartment in Manhattan once. He mixes with a tablet, rather than mouse or trackball, and the pen for the tablet is adorned with a large pink feather. I can't help but think that the pink feather, alone, is responsible for 15% of the sound of his mixes.

Good stuff, Charlie. I look forward to keeping up with this.

[Don Chaffer]

Sorry. My bad. The feather, as it happens, is RED.