One of the few, perhaps even only, benefits of getting old is that you have the hindsight of history with which to view things. This is especially true of technological advancements. Some of us have seen more technologies come and go than we’ve had hot dinners. Many of them were heralded as the ‘next-big-thing!’ or dare I say ‘game changers.’ Few managed to get beyond the hype of over-excited marketing executives and survived.
In this article are technologies that really did make a splash when they arrived, so much so that all three were predicted to be the death of something, as you will see, none of them were.
Drum Machines Will End Drummers
It’s hard to imagine today how bad the first drum machines sounded. When I say bad, what I mean is they didn’t sound anything like a real drum kit and certainly didn’t perform like a real drummer. The early drum machines were very similar to the rhythm section found in home organs. The kick and snare went boop, bop and the hi-hats went tish, tish.
Early machines in the late 70s were created by companies like Roland with their CR78, which followed on from the Roland Rhythm 33, 55 and 77 machines. You can hear them on tracks like In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins and I Can’t Go For That by Hall and Oates.
Now if you take a listen to either of those tracks you’ll be hard pushed to convince anyone that those are the sound of a real drum kit, played by a good drummer. However, it was these exact machines that had some people claiming that this would spell the end for drummers and that within a few years we’d all be using drum machines.
As drum machines evolved and products like the orginal Linn LM-1 and the Oberheim DMX appeared, drum machines become more credible. The Guardian newspaper writing about them said; “Previously dismissed as toys, drum machines soon had sticksmen running scared after the arrival of these two credible, powerful instruments in the early 80s.” I don’t think the original advert for the Linn LM-1 did much to help drummers with their insecurity!
There’s an excellent article on the Linn LM-1 and artists who used it here.
However, despite even the advances in the 80s and 90s with drum machine hardware, and more latterly software, real drummers are still alive and well and playing real kits and doing a fantastic job.
Samplers Will End The Need For Real Musicians
I remember unboxing the Ensoniq Mirage. It was 1984 and the Mirage was the first affordable sampling keyboard for the mass market - around £1299. Up until that point there was the Fairlight CMI and the Emu Emulator both out the reach of mere mortals due to their high price. One could argue the first sampling keyboard was the Mellotron, using tapes to play back recordings of conventional instruments. However, digital sampling brought it to the masses.
I remember putting in the system floppy disc and then loading the piano sound. Wow, we thought as we played it, it’s a real piano! Well it was as long as you didn’t put it anywhere near a real piano. In hindsight, all early piano samples were woeful, but at lot better than the sounds being achieved using synthesis. A tale I was told at the time was that Technics had sent a sample-based keyboard to a top band to try out. They sent it back with a message saying; “next time open the lid before you record the sound!” However true that tale is, it did sum up the somewhat limited fidelity of early sample based sound.
It took a few more years for more powerful affordable samplers to arrive that offered more memory, stereo playback and other tools. When samplers arrived, the most common thing people recorded first was farts and burps, a la Ferris Bueller! It’s funny how such powerful tech for the time spurned our juvenile nature!
Over the decade samplers become the must-have tech in both pro and home studios. They ranged from the high cost Fairlights and Emulators to more budget friendly Akai, Roland, Casio and other brands. By the end of the decade you could buy a Casio keyboard for £100 that offered sampling.
Again, as sampling came to the fore, some predicted the end of road for real musicans. Samplers offered everything from drums to entire orchestras. Would this mean they would end up out of a job? Nope. On the whole those people continued to work.
One of the biggest reasons for this, is that however good a sample or library you have, it’s hard to pull off the performance of the real musician. I was selling this stuff at the time and I remember having to work incredibly hard to build a demo repertoire that showed each sound off at it’s best. Some of my attempts were woeful, especially with things like sax, violin and Japanese nose flute. It’s still the same today, using samples of any kind takes a lot of talent and skill.
Plugins Will Replace Hardware
It was the late 90s and I’d gone to a local studio to mix some tracks on a Pro Tools system. I’d never seen or used one until this point. It was when he first used a plugin on a track, I thought holy shit! is this real? I can use all sorts of things that were usually only available as hardware as software AND as many copies as I like? I left that studio thinking I have to get Pro Tools! What’s more is that he was using the stock plugins. You can see how primitive they were compared to modern plugins in the image above.
Over the years plugins have developed at an astounding rate, now it’s hard to tell the difference between the plugin and the hardware. Even better, they cost a fraction of the price of the hardware, you get to use many instances and have recall on the mix.
If anything was going to spell the end of hardware, then plugins are the most likely candidate. However, something strange has happened, rather than shrink the market, the exact opposite has taken place. There’s an entire new industry now with people making clones, and original hardware, with new hardware products coming out, almost on a weekly basis.
Many of the people buying the hardware have the plugin version, but now want the real thing too. It’s almost as if the plugin has acted like an advert for the hardware.
Why These Predications Rarely Come True
There is a simple reason why these kind of predictions rarely come true and that is that they fail to take context into account. Consider for a moment the kind of people who benefit most from using drum machines, samplers and plugins. They are the people who in many cases, are unable to afford a session drummer, an orchestra, or choir. They couldn’t afford a Steinway grand or have the space to keep one if they could. They are unlikely to be able to afford the kind of hardware the plugins are emulating. Even most professionals are unable to afford an original Fairchild or Pultec.
Of course there will be some people who take the convenience of a drum VI over a drummer and the kit, but not as many as one would think. When drum machines first came to market there was a common joke; “What’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?” Answer; “You only have to punch the data into a drum machine once.” However, any drummer will know, there’s always an excuse for a drummer joke.
But setting that aside, most of the kind of people using a Spitfire orchestra, Superior Drummer, or an SSL E Series clone, would never have access to the real thing in the first place.
What technology has helped us to do, is not replace the hugely talented artists or the amazing equipment we’ve seen used by top studios, acts and musicians, but to have a chance of using a facsimile of them.
Synths, samplers and drum machines, have their place. Some of my favourite bands have built huge careers around them such as the Pet Shop Boys and the Human League. However, one could argue it was because of these technologies that we ended up with synth pop, not that synth pop replaced another genre.
As someone who’s used perhaps every piece of equipment that claims to be able to replace the real thing, in 40 years I can say, I’d still use the real thing every time for the kind of music I make. I’m less bothered about plugins and their hardware equivalent, partly because I can’t be faffed to set the hardware up for the negligible benefits it offers me. With that said, if I was in a large studio with all that stuff to hand and the engineer to drive it, then I’d probably use the hardware.
We continue to see those who will predict the end of real music, or mastering, or take your pick, when a new technology emerges. This old fart says that in forty years I’m yet to see many of those predictions come true.