¿Quién toca la batería en esta canción?

We ask ourselves

• Is anybody actually playing the drums on this song?
• Why do so many eighties songs have exactly the same snare sound?
• If a machine never tires and never misses, what is lost?
• How many people does it take to record a song today?
• Can you play with your body what a machine does?
• If a programmed song could last as long as it likes, why does it still last three minutes?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

Before playing any song, we build the grid together. Sixteen slots, which is one bar of 4/4 counted in sixteenth notes.

• Feet stamp on slots 1, 5, 9 and 13. That is the kick drum, and it is what we call four on the floor.
• Hands clap only on 5 and 13. That is the snare, landing on the weak beats.
• Mouth makes a ts on every odd slot. That is the hi-hat.

When the three layers hold together without speeding up, you have done what a drum machine does. The hard part is not the pattern: it is keeping it identical.

Now play Blinding Lights, all of it, with nobody talking over it.

What changed

For seventy years, recording drums meant the same thing: a person, a room with the right reverberation, a set of microphones and several hours. And it meant something more important: the drummer decided how the song breathed. Pushing a beat, hitting harder in the chorus, tiring towards the end.

In 1980 Roland put the TR-808 on sale. It cost a thousand dollars, when Linn's rival machine cost five thousand. It did not imitate a real kit well, and that flaw became its identity: that long kick and that dry clap do not sound like drums, they sound like the 808, and you can still recognise them in songs written long after it stopped being made.

What changes in the ear is one specific thing: exactness. A programmed hit always lands in the same place with the same force. The song stops breathing and starts turning. That identical repeating figure is called a loop, and once you hear it you no longer expect something different to happen; you expect things to pile on top. That is why so many programmed songs grow in layers rather than in sections.

And it changes who is in the room. With a drum machine one person alone can finish a song, and the producer becomes another instrumentalist. Drums stop being something you play and become something you write, slot by slot, and something you can fix without playing again.

Hard facts: Roland TR-808, 1980, programmable, one thousand dollars. LinnDrum, 1982-1985, around five thousand units, designed by Roger Linn, already using recorded sounds from a real kit. Between them they account for most of what the decade sounds like.

Foto: Carl Lender, CC BY-SA 3.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

The same device elsewhere

The drum machine did not invent the loop. It made it cheap. These three prove it, and they are worth hearing back to back:

• Blinding Lights — the base never changes. The only thing that moves is how many people are playing on top of it.
• Ravel's Boléro (1928) — the snare repeats the same bar for fifteen minutes without varying once. It is a person acting as a machine, and it is exhausting to play.
• The Cuban clave — five strokes that repeat and organise everything else. It has done so for centuries without any machine.

None is better than the others. All three do the same job: put something unchanging underneath, so that what happens on top can mean something.

And here at home?

In Madrid the machine arrives early. Aviador Dro is founded in 1979 and is the pioneering Spanish electronic pop band, looking towards Kraftwerk and Devo. Soon after, Mecano takes the synthesiser to number one, which is what the Maquillaje article in the library is about.

In Zaragoza the eighties sound like something else. Héroes del Silencio forms in the middle of the decade with guitar, bass and played drums, and before them what there is is the Nueva Canción Aragonesa, led by Labordeta. The bridge between the two worlds is a man from Zaragoza, Santiago Auserón, who came out of the Madrid scene with Radio Futura.

It is an awkward fact and that is exactly why it is worth telling: the drum machine arrived here late and unevenly. The sound of the eighties in Aragón is a guitar, not a box.

Classroom activities

• While Blinding Lights plays: everyone raises a hand when a new layer comes in. Afterwards we count how many hands went up, and in what order.

• While We Will Rock You plays: half the class keeps the sixteen-slot grid with feet and hands. Same function, body instead of machine.

• Play: we build Blinding Lights with the band. The full-band chart and the tab are attached to its own article.

• Create: programme two bars and repeat them for one minute, adding a layer every eight bars and never changing the base. Steal the procedure, not the song.

Key vocabulary

• Drum machine — caja de ritmos: una máquina que toca percusión a partir de un patrón escrito
• Grid — rejilla (las casillas en que se divide el compás para programar)
• Loop — bucle: una figura que se repite idéntica
• Four on the floor — el bombo en los cuatro tiempos
• To quantise — cuantizar: mover cada golpe a la casilla exacta

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: Blinding Lights, We Will Rock You, Saturn.

The song of the unit — Blinding Lights, The Weeknd (2019). Its article, with the full-band chart and the tab, is in the library.

The body version — We Will Rock You, Queen (1977).

The loop in the orchestra — Ravel's Boléro, hr-Sinfonieorchester. Watch the snare: it never stops and never changes.

The loop without a machine — how to play the Cuban clave, the pattern that organises son and salsa.

• More from this era — "The 1980s Musical Revolution: Synths, Screens and Sequencers", in the library.
• In Spanish — "Maquillaje", Mecano (1982), in the library.