Beat Box: A Drum Machine Obsession
In a 200-page coffee table book, Hip Hop producer and music veteran, Joe Mansfield, turned his obsession with beat boxes into a drum machine tribute. Featuring 75 drum machines from Joe Mansfield’s own collection alongside more than 200 photos by award-winning photographer Gary Land, the book illustrates the rise and fall of the beat box spanning 30 years.
Beat boxes have been used in rock and pop since the 1970s Kraftwerk, the Yellow Magic Orchestra, Blondie and other artists. In the 1980s the list expands to include artists such as New Order, Madonna, Prince and Bruce Hornsby.
The early pages of the book describe machines that were mostly designed with preset rhythms including Foxtrot, Watusi and Twist. As the book proceeds through the evolution of drum machines, preset rhythms disappear gradually as the machines shift roles from responding to musical trends into creating those trends. This meant that the machines came to be perceived and played as instruments unto themselves. Some of those revolutionary machines were the LM-1, the Roland TR-808 and TR-909 (1980 and 1984, respectively) and the Oberheim DMX (1982) each of which came without presets and appears on numerous pop-hits from the 1980s until present.
Apart from background and facts about each machine collected by Joe Mansfield the book features interviews with master drum machine programmers and innovators including Davy DMX, Schoolly-D, Marshall Jefferson and Roger Linn.
Importantly, Joe Mansfield demonstrates that the Drum Machines are not just a collection of historical artefacts. He can play and program each machine featured in the book as he demonstrates in an exclusive cassette accompanied by the Beat Box book. The cassette includes 18 beats recreated by Joe Mansfield of Pop, Rock, Hip Hop and Dance classics created with 11 different drum machines. The machines used for the cassette are all included in the book and include the Linn LM-1 Drum Computer, Oberheim DMX, Roland TR-808, Vox Percussion King and many more.
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