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The Rhythm Of Music Technology
The drum machine is today an electronic instrument made to imitate drum or other percussion instrument’s sound. Although a young invention, it has been a difficult process to go from concept to building a working drum machine. Moreover, the concept itself changed in time as technology evolved and several people put their mark on its history.
It took almost 30 years from the drum machine’s first ancestor, the Rhythmicon, to the first commercially produced version, in 1959. The Rhythmicon was an invention designed to play compositions with multiple rhythmic patterns, which would have been impossible for one person to produce playing an instrument. It was an incredible complex and hard to use device and it needed many improvements.
That first commercially produced drum machine was very appropriately called the Sideman, as it started as an accompaniment for the producer’s organs, string instruments being their main production line. This version was an electro-mechanical device that could play predefined rhythm patterns. In the 60’s drum machines were mainly integrated in organs for accompaniment.
But soon producers started to develop individual drum machines, especially with the rise of electronic music. Many notorious musical instrument producers took on the challenge and Yamaha was one of them. The first Yamaha drum machine was a real matter of engineering and ingenious problem solving, but it still just played back what was prerecorded, mainly imitating drum sounds.
One of the earliest models, the RX11, was launched in the early 80’s and it was a highly modern instrument. Nowadays, drum lovers and Yamaha fans alike smile melancholically at this Yamaha drum machine, as they recognize the sounds are of pretty bad quality, especially the cymbals. But nothing was born perfect overnight and Yamaha continued working on this machine’s design and features, eventually producing objects they would have never dreamed of 10 years back.
The QY10 Yamaha drum machine was the first such device to be portable and battery operated, but it was much more than just a drum machine, it was a real music workstation which included a drum machine, but also a music sequencer and a small single-octave keyboard and it was mainly a composing tool. Its production began in the early 1990’s and it inspired music technology press to call it a ‘walkstation’, which is the predecessors of ‘workstation’ and the very famous ‘walkman’.
One of the more recent products, the RM1x, would be wrongly called a Yamaha drum machine for it is a very complex device containing a programmable drum machine, a synthesizer, a music sequencer and a control area. It includes 46 drum kits, 60 styles with 16 patterns per style, 20 songs and 110 000 note sequencer.
Now, for an outsider these numbers may not mean much, but they reflect the long, exciting path the Yamaha drum machine took from its first apparition until this day. Yamaha never stood out a challenge and it took the drum machine by storm, combining it with other technologies and improving the ones they already had making it almost unrecognizable.