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A drum machine is an electronic musical instrument that creates percussion sounds, drum beats, and patterns. Drum machines may imitate or other percussion instruments, or produce unique sounds, such as synthesized electronic tones. A drum machine often has pre-programmed beats and patterns for popular genres and styles, such as pop music, rock music, and dance music. Most modern drum machines made in the 2010s and 2020s also allow users to program their own and beats. Drum machines may create sounds using analog synthesis or play prerecorded samples.
While a distinction is generally made between drum machines (which can play back pre-programmed or user-programmed beats or patterns) and (which have pads that can be struck and played like an acoustic drum kit), there are some drum machines that have buttons or pads that allow the performer to play drum sounds "live", either on top of a programmed drum beat or as a standalone performance. Drum machines have a range of capabilities, which go from playing a short beat pattern in a loop, to being able to program or record complex song arrangements with changes of meter and style.
Drum machines have had a lasting impact on popular music in the 20th century. The Roland TR-808, introduced in 1980, significantly influenced the development of dance music, especially electronic dance music, and hip hop. Its successor, the TR-909, introduced in 1983, heavily influenced techno and house music. The first drum machine to use samples of real drum kits, the Linn LM-1, was introduced in 1980 and was adopted by rock music and pop music artists including Prince and Michael Jackson. In the late 1990s, Emulator began to overtake the popularity of physical drum machines housed in a separate plastic or metal chassis.
Next, their effort was focused on the improvement of reliability and performance, along with size and cost reductions. Unstable vacuum tube circuits were replaced with reliable transistor circuits on the Donca-Matic DC-11 in the mid-1960s. In 1966, the bulky mechanical wheel was also replaced with a compact transistor circuit on the Donca-Matic DE-20 and DE-11. In 1967, the Mini Pops MP-2 was developed as an option for the Yamaha Electone (electric organ), and Mini Pops was established as a series of compact desktop rhythm machines. In the United States, Mini Pops MP-3, MP-7, etc. were sold under the Univox brand by the distributor at that time, Unicord Corporation.
In 1965, Nippon Columbia filed a patent for an automatic rhythm instrument. It described it as an "automatic rhythm player which is simple but capable of electronically producing various rhythms in the characteristic tones of a drum, a piccolo and so on." It has some similarities to Seeburg's slightly earlier 1964 patent.
In 1967, Ace Tone founder Ikutaro Kakehashi (later founder of Roland Corporation) developed the preset rhythm-pattern generator using diode matrix circuit, which has some similarities to the earlier Seeburg and Nippon Columbia patents. Kakehashi's patent describes his device as a "plurality of inverting circuits and/or clipper circuits" which "are connected to a counting circuit to synthesize the output signal of the counting circuit" where the "synthesized output signal becomes a desired rhythm."
Ace Tone commercialized its preset rhythm machine, called the FR-1 Rhythm Ace, in 1967. It offered 16 preset patterns, and four buttons to manually play each instrument sound (cymbal, claves, cowbell and bass drum). The rhythm patterns could also be cascaded together by pushing multiple rhythm buttons simultaneously, and the possible combination of rhythm patterns were more than a hundred (on the later models of Rhythm Ace, the individual volumes of each instrument could be adjusted with the small knobs or faders). The FR-1 was adopted by the Hammond organ for incorporation within their latest organ models. In the US, the units were also marketed under the Multivox brand by Peter Sorkin Music Company, and in the UK, marketed under the Bentley Rhythm Ace brand.
The German krautrock band Can also used a drum machine on their songs "Peking O" and "Spoon". The 1972 Timmy Thomas single "Why Can't We Live Together"/"Funky Me" featured a distinctive use of a drum machine and keyboard arrangement on both tracks. Another early example of electronic drums used by a rock band is Obscured by Clouds by Pink Floyd in 1972. The first album on which a drum machine produced all the percussion was Kingdom Come's Journey, recorded in November 1972 using a Bentley Rhythm Ace. French singer-songwriter Léo Ferré mixed a drum machine with a symphonic orchestra in the song "Je t'aimais bien, tu sais..." in his album L'Espoir, released in 1974. Miles Davis' live band began to use a drum machine in 1974 (played by percussionist James Mtume), which can be heard on Dark Magus (1977). Osamu Kitajima's Progressive rock psychedelic rock album Benzaiten (1974) also used drum machines.
Another stand-alone drum machine released in 1975, the PAiA Electronics Programmable Drum Set was also one of the first programmable drum machines, and was sold as a kit with parts and instructions which the buyer would use to build the machine.
In 1975, Ace Tone released the Rhythm Producer FR-15 that enables the modification of the pre-programmed rhythm patterns. — Sakata Shokai/Ace Tone Rhythm Producer, a successor of Rhythm Ace after the reconstruction of Ace Tone brand in 1972, provided feature to modify the pre-programmed rhythms. In 1978, Roland released the Roland CR-78, the first microprocessor-based programmable rhythm machine, with four memory storage for user patterns. In 1979, a simpler version with four sounds, Boss Corporation DR-55, was released.
Steely Dan recording engineer Roger Nichols developed a 125kHz/12bit sampling drum machine and audio sampler in 1978 that he named Wendel, which was used on the “Gaucho” album in January 1979 for drums and percussion.
Many of the drum sounds on the LM-1 were composed of two chips that were triggered at the same time, and each voice was individually tunable with individual outputs. Due to memory limitations, a crash cymbal sound was not available except as an expensive third-party modification. A cheaper version of the LM-1 was released in 1982 called the LinnDrum. Priced at $2,995 (), not all of its voices were tunable, but crash cymbal was included as a standard sound. Like its predecessor the LM-1, it featured swappable sound chips. The LinnDrum can be heard on records such as The Cars' Heartbeat City and Giorgio Moroder's soundtrack for the film Scarface.
It was feared the LM-1 would put every session drummer in Los Angeles out of work and it caused many of L.A.'s top session drummers (Jeff Porcaro is one example) to purchase their own drum machines and learn to program them themselves in order to stay employed. Linn even marketed the LinnDrum specifically to drummers.
Following the success of the LM-1, Oberheim introduced the Oberheim DMX, which also featured digitally sampled sounds and a "swing" feature similar to the one found on the Linn machines. It became very popular in its own right, becoming a staple of the nascent hip-hop scene.
Other manufacturers soon began to produce machines, e.g. the Sequential Circuits Drumtraks and Tom, the E-mu Drumulator and the Yamaha RX11.
In 1986, the SpecDrum by Cheetah Marketing, an inexpensive 8-bit sampling drum external module for the ZX Spectrum, was introduced, with a price less than £30, when similar models cost around £250.
Launched when electronic music had yet to become mainstream, the 808 received mixed reviews for its unrealistic drum sounds and was a commercial failure. Having built approximately 12,000 units, Roland discontinued the 808 after its semiconductors became impossible to restock.
Over the course of the 1980s, the 808 attracted a cult following among underground musicians for its affordability on the used market, ease of use, and idiosyncratic sounds, particularly its deep, "booming" bass drum. It became a cornerstone of the emerging electronic, dance, and hip hop genres, popularized by early hits such as Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" and Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force's "Planet Rock". The 808 was eventually used on more hit records than any other drum machine; its popularity with hip hop in particular has made it one of the most influential inventions in popular music, comparable to the Fender Stratocaster's influence on Rock music. Its sounds continue to be used as samples included with music software and modern drum machines.
The 808 was followed in 1983 by the TR-909, the first Roland drum machine to use MIDI, which synchronizes devices built by different manufacturers. It was also the first Roland drum machine to use samples for some sounds. Like the 808, the 909 was a commercial failure, but had a lasting influence on popular music after cheap units circulated on the used market; alongside the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer, it influenced the development of electronic genres such as techno, House music and Acid house.
There are percussion-specific that can be triggered by pickups, , or through MIDI. These are called Electronic drum; the Alesis D4 and Roland TD-8 are popular examples. Unless such a sound module also features a sequencer, it is, strictly speaking, not a drum machine.
In the 2010s a revival of interest in analogue synthesis resulted in a new wave of analogue drum machines, ranging from the budget-priced Korg Volca Beats and Akai Rhythm Wolf to the mid-priced Arturia DrumBrute, and the high-end MFB Tanzbär and Dave Smith Instruments Tempest. Roland's TR-08 and TR-09 Rhythm Composers were digital recreations of the original TR-808 and 909, while Behringer released an analogue clone of the 808 as the Behringer RD-8 Rhythm Designer. Korg released an analog drum machine, the Volca Beats, in 2013.
If the drum machine has MIDI connectivity, then one could program the drum machine with a computer or another MIDI device.
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