< PreviousModern Drummer November 2022 58November 2022 Modern Drummer 59Modern Drummer November 2022 60 Check out Joe’s Modern Drummer pro le page and get your copy of Double Bass Drumming at moderndrummer.comBuy from your favorite retailer check out more at moderndrummer.com Gary Chester’s New Breed Presents:Modern Drummer November 2022 62 Hybrid Drumming / The Electro-Organic Approach By Tony Verderosa T here are special moments in the musical instrument industry when instrument manufacturers produce some truly innovative products. These are risky ventures nancially, but amazing things can happen when engineers and designers are given the time and resources to innovate and push the boundaries creatively. When lightning strikes, these new instruments inspire musicians to think di erently about creating and performing music. This month’s column is a special nod to those inventors and entrepreneurs that are experimenting in garage workshops or those that already work as designers inside some of the top global music companies. We are all excited to see new combinations of technologies in the world of drumming and percussion over the coming years. The most creatively satisfying electronic drum instruments that I have played in the past few years were designed around an “electro-organic” or “electro-acoustic” approach. Electro- acoustic drums serve a di erent purpose compared with more traditional electronic drum sets. For clari cation, let me say that all electronic drums provide value, and function di erently depending on their design. Let’s look at a couple of di erent roles these instruments play, in the day to day life of drummers. Functional / Supportive Touring bands and recording artists have the need to “bring the studio to the stage”. Drummers require electronic drum kits and/or multi-pad drum devices with lots of sample memory so we can trigger the exact samples from each drum as they were mixed in the studio for each song. What the audience hears on stage will sound exactly as it does on the big hit records. Butch Vig’s latest tour with his band Garbage is a great example of why this solution is so important. He had to spend hours and hours in pre-production importing and mapping out uniquely compressed and processed drum and cymbal samples from his studio sessions right on to his Roland V-Drums. This is a critical and important solution that many drummers require. Electronic drum sets are also supportive because they function as “silent” practice kits for home use in addition having a huge role in drum set education. Creative / Experimental In this month’s article I am highlighting instruments that are very di erent from the practical solutions described above. In the creative drumming community, we need inspiring electro-organic drum instruments that are imaginative and intuitive to play. We need new instruments that become integral to the creation of a new song during the composing and studio production process. In this case the objective is to design “unexpected” instruments that are at the forefront of the creative process and become part of the sound of modern music. Lets look at it from this perspective, the new Roland SPD-SX Pro Sampling drum pad has 32GB of internal sample memory. That’s 44 hours of 48kHz/16 bit stereo samples! The SPD-SX Pro was created to bring the world’s most creative sounds on to the stage. To stand out and get people’s attention, you will want to make sure that you are lling up that sample memory with unusual and groundbreaking sounds and song elements. If that is your goal, then you want to “up your game” as a music producer and sound designer. That is exactly why the world needs sounds and textures that have never been heard before. We need new ways of approaching instrument design. It’s about the sound and feeling that a new instrument can provide. It’s about sparking inspiration. November 2022 Modern Drummer 63 Think of the global in uence that the Roland TB-303, TR-808 and 909 had on the Detroit techno sound and the emergence of Hip Hop music. Those instruments were created by Ikutaro Kakehashi, also known by his nickname Taro. He was a Japanese engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur. He founded the musical instrument manufacturers Ace Tone, Roland Corporation, and Boss Corporation, and the audiovisual electronics company, ATV Corporation. It’s important to mention that the initial commercial release of the Roland TB-303, TR-808, and 909 was a failure. The drum sounds in the 808 and 909 were considered “not realistic”, and yhe TB-303 had “unrealistic” bass sounds. Eventually electronic music became more mainstream, and all of these instruments and sounds became iconic. These “unrealistic sounds” became THE sound of modern music. If I had the leading engineers from the world’s biggest music companies in an elevator and just ten seconds to get my point across, I would say the following, “Hey - we need new instruments that o er their own unique musical sounds. They should have a highly expressive, natural playing feel that is almost identical to playing an acoustic drum or hand drum. Can you design something that straddles the line between acoustic and electronic drums?” It is vital for the industry to have designers working closely with engineers and music artists to come up with completely new concepts. Electro-Organic Experiments Let’s have a look at some unusual instruments that were released over the past few years that utilize features you typically won’t nd in today’s electronic drum systems. Over the next decade, we will witness new concepts in the eld of digital drum design that blur the lines between “acoustic and electronic”. This will be the new frontier. Hybrid drumming requires a “DIY” approach and lots of patience. Creative hybrid drummers are pushed into a corner because we have no choice but to build our very own individualized, “electro- organic” set ups using triggers, pads, pedals, Ableton live, fx pedals and much more. Everyone is approaching hybrid drumming di erently, but there is a common thread. The common element is the “creative merger of electronic and acoustic sounds”. My own personal set up involves a maxed out 27” iMac Pro, audio interfaces, 16 channels of Class A mic pre-amps, a collection of amazing microphones, hardware synthesizers, a DAW (Cubase Pro), dozens of VST virtual instruments, a Midi Drum Controller, acoustic drum triggers, numerous drum pads, acoustic drums, acoustic cymbals, an array of unusual hardware FX Pedals, and much more. It is an insane amount of e ort to get all of these drums and triggers to respond and behave exactly as I want them to. The complexity of my hybrid system helped me appreciate a compact new electronic drum that I bought a few years ago from Sweetwater. It’s called the aFrame and it is made by ATV. Here is a quick experiment I recorded with the aFrame drum that explores one the electro-organic preset patches. There are many banks of presets that explore di erent categories of sound. There are banks that explore “Acoustic” sounds and various acoustic textures. There is a bank of sounds called “Neo-Acoustic” that explores the “electro-organic” character of the aFrame. There is another bank of sounds that explores deeply electronic tones but o ers the same playing experience as acoustic instruments. The track that I made in the video below ts into that “electronic” category. Its foundation is a deep synth bass tone, but at times it behaves like a super touch sensitive 32” concert bass drum that responds to the smallest nger tap. I am also changing the pitch of the “drum” by squeezing the playing surface which activates pressure sensors. There is a ton of distortion used on this example. By merely touching the edges of the frame, I can achieve some subtle nuance and strange overtones. Around the 2:20 mark, I started to explore aggressive nger nail scraping on the textured playing surface. The aFrame is marketed more toward percussionists, but it’s a drum synthesizer and can be enjoyed anyone that wants to play rhythms and experiment with sound design. If you don’t have ANY hand drumming skills, you will create some really cool ideas with this drum. If you have a background in Latin percussion, Arabic drumming, and Indian drumming, you will also feel very much at home. The aFrame was developed by Mr. Tsukasa Arakawa, who is a producer at the R&D Department of ATV’s Matsumoto Laboratory in conjunction with Mr. Ikuo Kakehashi, the aFrame development advisor and noted Japanese percussionist. The aFrame is a “microcosm” of this big sonic universe I built with my hybrid drum system. That’s part of the appeal for me. I can plug in a pair of headphones and get lost for hours with this instrument. It has all of the elements I need to explore drumming, composition, music production, and sound design in one lightweight drum. The frame of the drum is made from Bamboo by a very prominent Japanese company, Fujigen. Fujigen specializes in wood components for guitars as well as ultra-high-end wood designs for Luxury cars. The aFrame drum has its own built-in microphones, onboard synth, built in DSP e ects processing/mixing and pressure sensors. It works by taking the individual drum strikes that you make with your hands and ngers, and using these acoustic elements to interact with the DSP “band-pass” lters to create very unique sounds and textures. I love the fact that the rst part of the signal chain on this drum is your touch. ATV uses a proprietary “Adaptive Timbre Technology” that responds to your playing technique, accommodating all manner of striking, pressing, scraping and friction. I nd that using a battery pack connected to the aFrame drum gives me more exibility and more mobility. The drum does come with its own power supply but I prefer the battery pack which I secure to the drum using velcro. Modern Drummer November 2022 64 The aFrame has the immediacy and visceral response of a real drum. It also o ers musical scales and chords that I can create by triggering the internal DSP synth. There’s also lots of onboard e ects such as delays, reverbs, compression and more. The ATV aFrame provides an array of scales and arpeggios, such as Minor scales, Major Scales, Pentatonic Scales, Arabic, Lydian, Mixolydian scales and so on. The melodic scale functions can be controlled by pressure! You can see in this video example, I am pressing my ngers into the drum to change up the notes in a given scale. You can also control the panning position of di erent timbres according to the pressure you apply to the head. Notice the MultiClap I attached to the frame of the drum. That small wooden device from Schlagwerk provides some additional overtones for me to explore while improvising. Keep in mind that if I am in a writing session with a guitar player or trumpet player, and they decide it would be more comfortable playing in the key of D, I just need to press a couple of buttons and store that edit change. The aFrame has a familiar feel with an immediate response because it allows me to use simple hand motions to bend or dampen notes. The aFrame can also accommodate extremely subtle playing nuances like scraping brushes, mallets or hands/ ngertips across the textured playing surface. It can even capture subtle nger tapping or the scraping of ngernails across the surface. The poly carbonate playing surface is pressure sensitive and responds like a real acoustic drumhead, conga or frame drum. But at the same time, it’s also electronic. I have included some photos that provide a good view of the textured playing surface. The aFrame has a sound engine and physical playing surface that is fully integrated into one lightweight drum frame. If you push your hand into the drum or press your ngers into the playing surface, it will change the pitch of the drums and sounds in much the same way as pushing on an acoustic conga, oor tom or large frame drum. The aFrame gives me that immediate sense of familiarity as a drummer/percussionist but it’s also full of surprises because the DSP electronic tones are blended and integrated so seamlessly. Latency is a non-issue because this drum is not based on midi. By dampening the drum, you can a ect the decay of some of the sounds and a ect how the delays and reverbs react. Here is another video example where you can see my left hand is dampening the sound of the drum as I play the grooves. I am using an Innovative Percussion BR5 plastic brush to generate some swirling, uttering overtones. As the brush is sweeping across the playing surface, my left hand is “pushing into the drum” to change the pitch. The aFrame pushes the boundaries creatively and merges the world of acoustic percussion with electronic synthesis and digital signal processing. It’s stands alone in a new category. Here is a quote from Master percussionist, Pete Lockett on the ATV aFrame: “The closest electronic percussion instrument that I’ve come across that feels like I’m playing an actual acoustic percussion instrument. I never thought that day would come to be quite honest. It feels like such a natural thing to play.” ATV aFrame Presets It is worth having a look at a couple of the aFrame Presets from their reference manual because the descriptions indicate the ambitions for this instrument in greater detail. Here are a few few of the presets and what they “do.” HocusPocus “An exotic synthesized sound is mapped to an Arabic scale. Pressure November 2022 Modern Drummer 65 scale control articulates expressive melodic cascades and also widens the stereo pan image of the sounds enriched with reverb.” I used the HocusPocus preset for the music on this video below. I love that I can explore creating lm score music with one drum. Around the one-minute mark, you can see I am clearing pressing my ngers into the head in order to melodically glide up and down the Arabic Music scale. BassOnBoard This is a bass sound in which pressure bends the octave up. The sub-timbre is used to produce a subtle attack. It’s simple parameter settings leave room to create more complex sounds. Hyper Pot This tone utilizes a timbre balance that responds to both the center and edge sensor, providing di erent characters depending on the location of the strike. With these settings, pressure mutes only the low frequency sound. Psycho Skin While this is a sound that does not exist in the acoustic world, you can obtain a nuanced performance by scratching and pressing the instrument. In this video example called “Chordal Nimbus”, I am again using the BR5 Brush to explore di erent textures on the aFrame. The melodic scale in this example is much more randomly generated. I am activating the scales using pressure with the ngers on my left hand. You will also notice a big shift in timbre as I switch from the brush side of the BR5 to the rubber handle. This track has a cinematic, expansive sound. I have always been inspired by the melodic and harmonic potential of electronic percussion since the earliest days of Simmons drums and the Yamaha DTS70 interface. It’s really great to see ATV embrace these musical modes in the design of the aFrame. A Related Cousin The aFrame drum is unlike anything else I have ever played, with the exception of a Korg Wavedrum. The Korg WaveDrum is de nitely a “cousin” to the ATV aFrame in some respects. The Wavedrum rst came out in 1994 and it has been updated and refreshed a few times in the past 10 years. The Wavedrum could also articulate subtle brush strokes, hand scrapes, muting and dampening. Market Impact Have these new “electro-acoustic” drum instruments taken the world by storm? Are they widely adopted by drummers with millions of units sold every year? Absolutely not. Do they push the boundaries in terms of expressive control and give us a glimpse of what the future of electronic percussion could be? The answer is de nitely yes. The creative potential is massive. I hope we see future iterations of the aFrame. The playing experience is really gratifying because it’s more closely aligned with acoustic drumming and acoustic percussion. The Future of Electro-Acoustic Drums I hope that this electro-organic approach does become more prominent and more advanced over the coming years. It is interesting that many electronic drum companies have started embedding their electronic drum pads inside real acoustic drum shells. That appears to be more about aesthetics and appearances on stage. I am sure this trend is also helping more acoustic drummers warm up to the idea of playing electronic drums. With a true electro-acoustic design, the drum shell, rim, tension rods and tunable playing surface would all have an impact on the nal sound of the instrument. It is not di cult to imagine a seamless merger that combines the nuance of acoustic drums with advanced synthesis, sound processing, and sound ampli cation technologies. Buying a drum set in 10 years will be a very di erent experience than what it is today. With advancements in technology and technology becoming more a ordable, you will be able to switch back and forth between a natural acoustic drum or ip a switch and the entire kit becomes a hybrid electronic system. Your “acoustic drums” will have no problem communicating with computers and recording technologies will be fully integrated. To conclude, let’s take a look at some of the groundbreaking instruments that shaped modern music over the past 50 years. There is a museum exhibit in Berlin called Good Vibrations - History of Electronic Music Instruments. Google Arts and Culture has also put together a wonderful story dedicated to these pioneering instruments. Bookmark this link and check it out. Below are just some of the classic synths and samplers mentioned in this story. They all introduced new technology that changed the sound of recorded music forever. As musicians, there is no greater feeling than discovering a new, groundbreaking instrument for the rst time. For instrument designers and engineers, I am sure the feeling is similar when you create a project or an instrument that literally changes the course of music history. Fairlight The rst purpose-built digital sampling instrument was the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument, created in 1979. Using microprocessors, the Fairlight was able to shift the pitch of sampled digital sounds better than any other system on the market. It was used on global hit songs produced by Kate Bush, Herbie Hancock, Modern Drummer November 2022 66 Peter Gabriel as well as numerous soundtracks and TV commercials. Moog Modular The Moog Modular was comprised of a series of individual components that produced or processed sound in various ways, it was connected by patch cables to create di erent con gurations of sound. This was the rst synthesizer to have a signi cant impact on pop music in the 1960s. It connected waveform oscillators, lters, and modulators and became the blueprint for modular synthesis as we know it today. Buchla Music Easel Don Buchla designed synthesizers that were free of conventional musical rules. His Music Easel was controlled by metal plates, optical sensors, and randomizable sequencers. Synclavier The Synclavier (Released in 1977) was the rst synth to make additive and FM synthesis available outside of a research laboratory. By connecting a computer, synthesists and sound designers could program sounds using just a few lines of code. LinnDrum Roger Linn’s drum machine was released in the early 1980s. It used samples of real drums and percussion instruments. This was in stark contrast to the early rhythm machines that preceded it. Those “rhythm machines” utilized synthetic, unrealistic, and synthesized drum sounds. The buzz at the time of the Linndrum was that it would eventually replace human drummers in the recording studio. Roland 303, 808, and 909 As I mentioned at the start of this article, sometimes new instrument designs can be nancially very risky for a manufacturer. When it was rst introduced by Japan’s Roland Corporation in 1981, the 303, 808 and 909 had terrible sales numbers. They were considered to be a complete failure. However, in time this series of instruments went on to change the sound of popular music. Yamaha DX7 In 1983 Yamaha’s DX7 went on to become one of the best-selling synthesizers of all time, selling more than 200,000 units. With the DX-7, Digital FM synthesis became available to the masses. The DX7 excelled at creating otherworldly, inharmonic, and glassy tones that analog synthesizers could not replicate. The DX-7 can be heard on records by everyone from Chick Corea to Michael Jackson, and from A-ha and Kool & The Gang to Whitney Houston and Phil Collins. E-MU SP-1200 In the late 1980s, the SP-1200 o ered sampling and sequencing capabilities in a portable design. It gave home based producers the ability to bypass expensive commercial studios. “Sampling” was widely adopted at this time for creating beats and full music tracks. The SP-1200 featured separate outputs, robust MIDI, and an onboard sequencer. Simmons Drums Originally, Simmons was a pioneering British manufacturer of electronic drums. Founded in 1978 by Dave Simmons, it created electronic kits from 1980 to 1994. The drums’ signature electronic sound can be found on countless albums from the 1980s. I brie y owned a Simmons midi controller. As a midi percussion controller, it was way ahead of its time. Roland TD7 The Roland TD7 Drum Kit was introduced in 1992-1993 using a special video production by CPP Media. This drum set had a big impact on the market and utilized round rubber pads for both the drum sounds and the cymbal sounds. It helped foster a much wider adoption of digital electronic drum sets. The sampled sounds were convincing and realistic and created a foundation for the continued success of Roland electronic drums. Yamaha DTS70 This instrument was designed more for acoustic drum triggering and hybrid drumming. It was very forward thinking in its design and musical exibility, but it also required that each drummer purchase their own synths and drum sound modules to produce music from pads and triggers. There were no internal sounds in this module. The DTS70 paved the way for today’s popular hybrid drumming styles where drummers incorporate triggers and a few drum pads into their set up to blend acoustic and electronic sounds. Here are a couple of examples of how I used the DTS70 in my hybrid set up over 30 years ago. This instrument excelled at o ering access to chordal harmonies and melodies if you decided to program these elements on each drum. Yamaha’s DTX900 Module The more “current” version of the DTS70 is Yamaha’s DTX900 Module, which was introduced in 2010. I use this module to this day because the midi triggering o ers me the most creative exibility of any modules currently on the market. I have all of the volume sliders turned OFF since I design all my own sounds and samples inside my external synths and computer-based instruments. Every sound you are hearing in this track is triggered in real-time. I am excited about the evolution of electronic drums and the future of hybrid drumming! Be sure to check out these videos below with Pete Lockett discussing and performing on the ATV aFrame. See you next month! Check out Tony’s Modern Drummer pro le page at moderndrummer.comBUY FROM YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC RETAILER CHECK OUT MORE AT MODERNDRUMMER.COM Available In Print and Digital Applying the Moeller Technique to the Bass Drum The Bass Drum Owners Manual DIGITAL DVD DOWNLOAD INCLUDEDNext >