by Unkle Buck

Created on: March 09, 2007   Last Updated: April 08, 2007

As a drummer with forty years experience I have played in just about every type of venue with every type of personnel configuration that one could imagine. From 250 pc marching bands, to 3, 4, 5 pc. Jazz and blues acts, even 27 pc. jazz acts, 80 pc orchestras, 7 pc. Top 40/Funk horn bands, even bluegrass, and country, and German Oompah bands; in addition to recording studios, including my little 8-trk digital audio/MIDI home studio. All of them fun, and presenting their own little unique challenges.

However, in the eighties when I was in a Top 40 4 pc act MIDI was born, and electronic drums and machines along with it. Kinda like "the Blues had a baby, and they named it Rock n' Roll!" I was playing an ABSOLUTELY gorgeous 7 pc. Sonor drum kit that was the spitting image of Steve Smith's kit of Journey when they were really smokin'. So, here I was with a $4,000 brand new kit about to be put out of work because every other musician alive thought "FINALLY, I don't have to deal with a drummer or his stinkin' volume anymore!" As if we're EVER going to solve the volume problem with guitarists. OK! OK! I even remember reading an interview with the legendary John Robinson in Modern Drummer about 7-8 years later about how he and several other legendary drummers would meet at his house back in those days to jam, but also have "clandestine" meetings about how they were going to make a living when all their band mates bought their own drum machines.

Well, as history would have it, their fears were unfounded. Yes, while all of the legendary session drummers scrambled to find their niche, or assimilation, or even another instrument, it soon became apparent that while MIDI and sampling technology most definitely improved the flexibility of music and how it was performed, you can't fake real music anymore than you can fake real love. And after 15 years of intense listening, and playing from both vantage points of technology for efficiency and technology for authenticity I'm here to point out the fork in the road.

If we back away from the musical aspect and look at how technology affects any task, we learn that some tasks just can't be shortcut. True, you might pay more for them without technology, but there's no doubt which is preferable if money is no object. Don't get me wrong for a New York Minute. Were it not for MIDI, being a drummer...even an educated one...I would have NEVER been able to bring to the world any of my ideas of arrangement and composition that I've been

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