Quite a few days ago, there was a discussion covering the above household appliances.
As a dinosaur, the reaction time of my brain is somewhat longer than the average, so I'd like to add some belated thoughts. One general trend of opinion was that the 909 especially was far too artificial, stiff, rigid sounding (plus similar adjectives) and generally lacking the ability to convey nuance and subtlety. Whilst I agree with all this, I also think that it's not the point. My feeling that it's a question of taste. My point is that, on the whole, I don't believe people actually *want* realism, nuance, velocity variation, etc and other *motifs which tend to belie that what you are listening to is indeed a machine*. I believe that most if not all of the time, people who like electronic dance music, have been socialized to become accustomed to the characteristics of many 'early' drum machines. The evidence of that is the continued prevalence of the staccato, or 'machine-gun' sounding flams (a type of drum roll), especially used in hi-hats on electro tracks. There's no way a real drummer could in most cases play a hi-hat that fast, or in such a uniform fashion on every stroke. But that's not the point, the point is that it's what people like to hear and it's become a standard in itself of what the norm is for electro. Electro tracks tend to use either real, or emulated 808 sounds. However, I think the case is the same for the 909, which we tend to hear a lot in house and techno (especially 'Jeff-Mills' type techno). People like the stiffness, the unaturalness of the way the 909 sounds. They don't expect it to sound like a real drummer. All this speaks of a subtle change in the way people appreciate music. In the early days of synthesized music, there was an intention to emulate the sound of 'real' or traditional instruments - although as we know, this often failed hilariously! But as synthesis caught on and it's possibilities flowered and became realized, it seems the purity of these 'new' sounds themselves took on a validity and value beyond the intention to imitate traditional instruments. I think the same sort of dynamic has happened with the archetypal drum machines of techno (and their imitators) and how people appreciate the sounds which they make. My 2 pence. Ok, three, sorry for the length. k
