What have Sly and the Family Stone, jazzman Dick Hyman and JJ Cale in common? They were among the pioneers who used a drum machine on their albums. And while a lot of people tend to associate drum machines with the 1980s, the first tentative steps into pop music were made in the early 1970s.
Daily web magazine Slate, owned by The Washington Post Company, has published a nice article about how the drum machine changed popular music.
It's packed with interesting background info and answers questions such as: when was the first commercially available drum machine, the Chamberlin Rhythmate, launched? What prompted Sly Stone to try a drum machine instead of long-time drummer Greg Errico? And why didn't its emergence in the early 1970s make a lot of waves?
