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Kind of inspired by the ditching guitar thread, but wanted to be able to leave that topic for its already good discussion, i realized yesterday, i have a new primary instrument: the Drum Machine. For over a decade i have first and foremost been a bassist, and have been obsessed with synthesizers even longer, but i am not a good keys player in a live setting, I need sequencing unfortunately. But recently, doing this electro-industrial project alone, and weird watery ambient techno with a partner, i have been playing drum machines a lot and loving them. They have become my starting point for all my musical ideas, the only instrument i feel confident both improvisig and writing on, and the instance of my most rewarding moments of creativity. I have found myself holding drum machines in a position bass has occupied since i was a teenager. What happened? I am a terrible drummer on acoustic kits, but i actually love drum machines and what i can do with them. I didn't mean to switch instruments, but whoops here i am? Has this happened to you? How did it feel? What did you do? Was it just a phase?

Teach me your ways.

I get stupid as shit behind a drum machine.

I switched from bass to guitar, but I feel like that's less of a leap than melodic to percussive instruments.

I think I've said this before, but back when I was young and stupid and impressionable I read a Les Claypool interview where he said something like "I mean I would make the same music if I was playing guitar, it's just the difference of drawing a picture with a sharpie instead of a paintbrush or a #2 pencil," and that's very much informed how I feel about this phenomenon ever since.

I went from trumpet (4 yrs), to piano(12 yrs), to electric bass (6 yrs), to acoustic guitar (5 yrs), to electric guitar (6 months).

Seems each different instrument has taught me something different about music itself...and I feel like I can express myself better on 6 string guitars than bass, piano, or trumpet, so I will probably just drift back and forth from acoustic to electric from now on, but I can see some synth blending in after a few years...the most important thing is finding a way to make the sounds you wanna make. Finding someone else who you can make sounds with, where the end product is how you and all the others want it to sound, with a minimum of drama and bullshit is the unicorn we all seek. Hehe.

The trauma of dealing with these other miserable hairless apes is what creates brilliant solo artists.

neonblack wrote:Teach me your ways.

I get stupid as shit behind a drum machine.

I switched from bass to guitar, but I feel like that's less of a leap than melodic to percussive instruments.

I (am happy that i) utterly failed to make the leap from bass to guitar.

Most of the music that i listen to that is beat oriented is trance, techno, or house from the 90s, or older industrial. I love dancing, but find hip-hop and breakbeats annoying to dance to (or i am just bad at that style of dancing). So I try to just start with the backbone of a beat that I find danceable, which usually means four on the floor and an interesting snare or clap pattern, and then work from there. I have been fucking around a lot with using two differently tuned kicks to make more interesting patterns, but I sort of approach it as i would writing melodic parts, kick and snare/clap are my bassline-lick backbone, toms, congas, weirder percussion lend atmosphere and more melodic content. Hats and rimshots can be either, cymbals are just hats with longer decay (on a drum machine). Part mutes are your friend.

Find a starting point you like for the bare bones - don't worry too much about sound design yet (unless this is a live improv setting) - and just let that play while you get in the feel. I find often my ideas are a lot less stupid than they feel to me. Try not to get too busy too quick. Just fuck with it. Often things won't feel complete to me until I get the sounds right, but i just have to let it go when writing. And again, i have learned to love these stupid boxes that many people revile as poor replacements for "true musicianship."

D.o.S. wrote:I think I've said this before, but back when I was young and stupid and impressionable I read a Les Claypool interview where he said something like "I mean I would make the same music if I was playing guitar, it's just the difference of drawing a picture with a sharpie instead of a paintbrush or a #2 pencil," and that's very much informed how I feel about this phenomenon ever since.

I love this quote. I do think drum machines inform my end result differently than say, fuzz bass, but this change only happened in January, so let's see if Les Claypool is smarter than me (probably, why not?)

Another way to look at it -- I feel like most of us are in the boat where we make music because it's music that we'd want to listen to that doesn't yet exist. That sort of aesthetic doesn't change substantially when you switch instruments, IME.

#alloneinstrument

#drummachinist

I was a bassist, fully committed to playing bass guitar with an absurd array of pedals for several years. Then I bought a Moog Guitar more or less on a lark and didn't touch a bass for like, 7 months. Played that constantly and with the utmost commitment until I got a Memotron, and now I'm mostly playing modular and Memotron. It's not a bad thing, just means that the noise you hear in your head becomes real easier/faster/more accurately with a new instrument.

I go through phases all the time, I think it's normal when you play more than one instrument. Right now I dislike playing electric guitar, though historically that's the instrument I've played the most. Sometimes I go through periods where all I want to do is do sound design and mixing, though I started playing music because I wanted to write songs. For some reason the only music I recorded in 2015 was ambient and harsh noise, even though I primarily write "Songs."

I don't think of this as a fundamental change in in identity.I have a lot of brushes I've learned how to paint with half from necessity ("I want bass on this song... better learn to play the bass") and half because I love all kinds of instruments, music, and different jobs in the production of music. Why limit myself to a narrow specialty?

i started out on guitar. picked up bass and switch between both frequently. i've been trying to get into drums for the longest time. i usually have a kit around, not my own, but now since i moved i have almost no room to setup a kit anywhere.

The first *instrument* I took to was Mario Paint (SNES) and later MTV Music Generator (PSX).
But my first proper instrument...and start...began with a drum machine. DR-110. Got it for $90 in the early 00s; ebay.
Before that I had been beatboxing mostly to myself since I was a kid. Suddently I was programming those rhythms and playing them back through subwoofers. But step-sequencing is tedious and largely obstructive to me. With Mario Paint it was entertaining. Music Generator not so much...with the 110 it was quite frustrating in executing grooves.
Back to messing around with software, Cool Edit, Fruity Loops, Reason early versions. Nothing stuck. Little inspiration, but plenty of growth.
Then I got turntables & a mixer. Was fascinated by turntablism, but the vinyl bug bit & I began going through phases of genre-hopping & exploration. As a listener.
Not long after I was loaned a Yamaha bass by an old friend. Months later received a MIM fretless Jazz Bass. Began playing along to dub plates, trying to figure out notes and riddims. Then fractured the wrist of my picking hand while skating & went through several years of no-music making, however I was a voracious sampler with my computer. Stockpiling bits & pieces, building a library. Listening. Deciding I prefer sonic textures with color & vintage amps, both instrument & hifi. After 5 years of this, while crate digging & listening to approx 10+ hours of music/day, I bought my MPC60 which rekindled everything. Picked up my bass again, synths...effects...& eventually guitar.
And a whole bunch of other stuff

Variety is the spice of life. Keeps things interesting.

psychic vampire. wrote:But recently, doing this electro-industrial project alone, and weird watery ambient techno with a partner, i have been playing drum machines a lot and loving them. They have become my starting point for all my musical ideas, the only instrument i feel confident both improvisig and writing on, and the instance of my most rewarding moments of creativity.

this is the only thing that matters, really. i like diversifying but in the end i what i value the most as a musician is the feeling of an instrument acting as an extension of myself, something that i can play fluently and channel ideas through without having to consciously think about it. i've had moments of this with other instruments (piano, bass vi, machinedrum) and wouldn't think twice about switching my overall preference if it really stuck, but in the end i always come back to electric guitar (probably because i've poured thousands of hours into it so there aren't really any glaring technical barriers anymore).
personally, a large factor for me is lack of self confidence so the ability to practice guitar unplugged and nobody hearing it helped me to develop quite significantly, i really wanted to be a saxophonist but they're just fucking impossible to practice quietly and i'd get really anxious and uncomfortable when trying to learn it. i'd like to try again one day, but yeah. it's weird when you've invested so much time into one instrument because it makes you feel that if you were to switch to something else you need to put in the equivalent amount of practice beforehand, but there's not much of a point to worrying about shit like that. just have fun.

My perspective is the opposite of a lot of yours. I'm a late bloomer when it comes to guitar.

I tried guitar for about a year when I was 10 but got discouraged because I couldn't achieve sounds like what I was hearing on records and had no one to play guitar with. So I got interested in synths and made the switch when I was 11 or 12. I nearly stopped playing them altogether a few years ago after about 20 years because I just got bored. I was occasionally in bands (postpunk and quirkier, shitty rock) and a few projects but never really found the type of people I wanted to collaborate with long-term and I'm not really a solo musician. When I was in my 20s, finding collaborators as a synth player in Dallas was nearly impossible for me because people either wanted you to be in their cover band or industrial-goth bullshit and what I wanted to do was old school synth pop and IDM. And from a creativity side, it got to a point where I started just making a lot of sounds that were similar regardless of what I was using. I had the opportunity to work with a lot of cool synths over the years, but they literally bore me to death now. I only use them occasionally now and I get bored very quickly.

My switching to guitar was a few years in the making because, I also liked a lot of guitar-centric stuff like The Church, The Smiths, Kitchens of Distinction, Ride, Slowdive,House of Love, and The Chameleons. I'm a horrible guitar player and because of my schedule, I don't have much time to spend learning how to play. I live in the bottom half of a duplex and can't often play without headphones because everything reverberates. I'm past that age where I could eventually join a band once I become semi-competent (most younger musicians I've encountered through CL are usually pretty ageist), but it still feels a lot more fun screwing around with my guitar and a lot of pedals on headphones than dicking around with synths/software.

I sound like me no matter what I play.

Switching instruments just puts me in a slightly different version of me.

backwardsvoyager wrote:

psychic vampire. wrote:But recently, doing this electro-industrial project alone, and weird watery ambient techno with a partner, i have been playing drum machines a lot and loving them. They have become my starting point for all my musical ideas, the only instrument i feel confident both improvisig and writing on, and the instance of my most rewarding moments of creativity.

this is the only thing that matters, really. i like diversifying but in the end i what i value the most as a musician is the feeling of an instrument acting as an extension of myself, something that i can play fluently and channel ideas through without having to consciously think about it. i've had moments of this with other instruments (piano, bass vi, machinedrum) and wouldn't think twice about switching my overall preference if it really stuck, but in the end i always come back to electric guitar (probably because i've poured thousands of hours into it so there aren't really any glaring technical barriers anymore).
personally, a large factor for me is lack of self confidence so the ability to practice guitar unplugged and nobody hearing it helped me to develop quite significantly, i really wanted to be a saxophonist but they're just fucking impossible to practice quietly and i'd get really anxious and uncomfortable when trying to learn it. i'd like to try again one day, but yeah. it's weird when you've invested so much time into one instrument because it makes you feel that if you were to switch to something else you need to put in the equivalent amount of practice beforehand, but there's not much of a point to worrying about shit like that. just have fun.

I agree with what you are saying. It was just weird, as i never really set out to make this change, or consciously decided i wanted a change of musical scenery. It seems to just be the direct end result of fucking around on music alone and in a new band doing music i love but never played in a band context before. And lately i have been playing bass in a cover band and fucing around with stringed instruments and amps feels dull in comparison. But everyone here is right, it certainly never felt like the end of the world, and it will probably just be a phase, or finding a different/more natural way of conveying what will end up being the same ideas. Just weird to experience for the first time. I have almost always had synths and guitars and drum machines around, but life just changed a little. Oh well.

Drum machines, though?