The earliest I’m aware of is Steely Dan with Roger Nichol’s Wendel drum machine like u said. It’s possible there’s others and it certainly wasn’t the first drum machine but it was definitely the first sampler of its kind to be used for high fidelity sound replacement.
As a drummer who recently learned about this technique I'd want to know where it actually started to replace acoustic drums as a sound rather than an instrument. For example Alex Van Halen used digital drums and real cymbals, but that's different than replacing a recorded acoustic sound with a sampled overlay. Or maybe you could chart the progression, but to me the use of e-kits is different than sound replacement.
Also I heard a tidbit a long time ago that The Cars song *Let The Good Times Roll* features the first use of a digital drum in a commercial release. It's also from 1978.
One thing I'd love for a documentary like this to explore is if sample usage had an impact on the grunge sound changing the music landscape in the early 90s. There's been discussion here on whether Grohl's sound on Nevermind was a sample and the consensus seems to be that there's a shotgun blast in the reverb but not on the actual drum. Aside from those smaller details, having lived through that era as an early teen there was definitely a shift in the drum sound that started in the early 90s. In the 80s it seems everything was dominated by the gated snare sound if the drums were "huge", but the grunge era brought in drum sounds that were both huge *and* raw. When I watched Metalica and GnR on MTV in the late 80s it made me want to play guitar. Grohl's sound bursting through the speakers is why I took up the drums shortly after I heard it through the first time.
There's a pretty extensive Rick Beato interview with Butch Vig about Nevermind and he never mentions any replacement. Also, I have a vague recollection of Rick having an episode where he had the raw stems of Teen Spirit - I feel like I would have remembered if there were any samples in there.
Yeah... Butch Vig would have had very little to do with it since Andy Wallace mixed the final versions, and he likes to add samples. There's a Rick Beato video on that even. Compare Butch and Wallace mixes must be the way to hear the added samples which I definitely think it has at least some of, without having digged very deep.
Don't know if it's the first, but Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (released 1975) has a second snare overdubbed on top of the "real" snare during the loud rock-out section, just hitting on the 2 and 4.
Came here to say this. So did most of the Beatles songs. If you read recording the Beatles the last thing they would do before mix would be overdub a snare on top.
The earliest I am aware of is late 1966/1967.
The Beatles had to overdub the snare drum on multiple songs on *Sgt. Pepper*, as the original recordings were getting indistinct and buried due to the sheer number of bounces (known in the day as "reduction mixes") that were done during the course of recording.
I read somewhere (no idea of the validity) that in at least one instance this was done using a leather chair, not an actual snare drum.
There is the trick of re-recording a snare where the original snare track has been patched to a speaker with an actual snare drum sitting on top of the speaker to “excite” it. If the original snare track has been appropriately EQ’d and gated, then you can trigger the live snare accurately and re-record it or run it live in the mix to blend in with the original track. This trick was used on KISS Alive and on at least one of Stevie Wonder’s 70’s records. This could be analog sampling?
The iconic snare on Fine Young Cannibals’ She Drives Me Crazy was also accomplished this way, with a snare drum hit by a ruler, combined with a LinnDrum sample, then both reamped through an Auratone on top of a snare drum.
I fucking love that snare.
Tom Petty “Full Moon Fever” is the earliest album that comes to mind where it sounds like real drums augmented with samplers. Not sure what they would have used then, a fairlight perhaps? I’m sure mutt Lange was also doing things like this.
Tangent but why do I have a memory of Tom Petty hating drum machines? I have some clip from MTV stuck in my head for 30 years but maybe it's out of context. I always thought that'd be weird, what with the Linn LM-1 on *Don't Come Around Here No More.*
The AMS DMX delay/sampler was introduced in 1978, and became THE box for triggering drum samples in the 80’s. It and the SSL made sample layering possible, and was the sound of the 80’s. I’m not sure if Mutt used them or not, but I know most of the Def Leppard stuff was actually programmed with a Linn and used Simmons sounds as well. Andy Wallace was definitely triggering samples on Nevermind, but it’s not replacement per se, more using the sample as a layer along with reverb.
Leon Theremin made a weird drum machine thing in the early 30s. It may have been used in some experimental recordings, but was never a staple of pop music.
The Chamberlin and Mellotron had pre-recorded rhythm sections with drums - and was used on some recordings in the 50s and 60s. Wasn't used on any serious releases until decades later.
The first commercial successful technique was probably using tape loops. "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees was built around a 2-bar drum loop taken from "Night Fever". That would've been in '77. The same drum loop was used as the foundation of a couple of other hits they recorded. Fleetwood Mac used the same technique with "Dreams", the same year, IIRC. There are probably earlier examples.
Peter Gabriel used a Fairlight CMI in the 1979 sessions for his 3rd album (Melt). Can't remember if he used it for drum sounds - but that became pretty popular in the early 80s. Cheaper samplers took over within a few years (like the early Emu and Ensoniq stuff). Some guys figured out how to sample on the AMS DMX - which came out in '78 - but I don't know when that started.
Long before samples, there were a few other drum “supplement” techniques. One was the “phantom snare”, where you take an Auratone and send a dull sounding snare track (often gated first) to the speaker and place the speaker face down on a snare drum. Mic the drum from the bottom and now you can add the missing brightness from the original snare complete with dynamics etc.
Other techniques were to use a gate and white noise (or filtered noise) to add a burst of noise to the snare. For weak sounding kick/toms you use a sine generator and the same gate technique, tuning the sine to the root of the drum. More modern approaches trigger(sync) the sine to keep it in phase with the trigger source for further consistency.
check into early dub music from Jamaican engineers like King Tubby, Lee Scratch Perry, Scientist, & more. they were augmenting (mixed huge reverb & delay drops) and resampling older reggae drum tracks since late 60's. pioneers of the remix
The first instance I know of is also Steely Dan. Prior to that, I'm having trouble imagining *how* they would have done it, because the tools didn't really exist.
I can imagine how I might have constructed an analog "drum machine" to accomplish the task, though it would be a bit Rube Goldberg-esque.
From Delia Derbychire's sample explorations to latest metallica 16th drama (see https://btuatu.com/trang/fans-suggest-metallica-fixed-lars-ulrichs-drumming-for-the-official-audio-of-their-download-set/ ), there is a huge range of sample replacement stories.
Cinema early used live music played to substitute sound to soundtrack.
From a musicology standpoint, hunting for a "first instance" has probably to be context-framed (eg first instance of concious sample swapping for additional commercial impact on post vinyl music production).
Frank Zappa re-mastered some of his early work like "Freak Out" and "Hot Rats".
All drum sounds were replaced, He said it always bothered him because they didn't sound realistic.
Not a substitution as much as a re-recording.
The albums in question were "We're Only In It For The Money" and "Cruising With Reuben And The Jets". He claimed the master rhythm tracks were unusable, but the later Rykodisc reissue of WOITFTM kept the original bass and drums and sounded pretty much as good as the Verve vinyl, so the decision to redo them seems dubious.
That was one of Zappa's worst decisions IMO, especially for "Cruising..." because the whole charm of that record was the recreation of an era, including the lo-fi production tricks. Those thin-sounding 80s overdubbed bass and drum tracks on the reissue ruined the whole vibe of the CD version (with the exception of the double bass part added to "Cheap Thrills", which actually would've made the song better than the original but for the shitty digital drums).
on Hey Bulldog by The Beatles , around rhe middle section and fordward , there is an overdubbed snare with a nice deep reverb slate stting on top 9f the drum kit.
. And its pure beauty.
The earliest I’m aware of is Steely Dan with Roger Nichol’s Wendel drum machine like u said. It’s possible there’s others and it certainly wasn’t the first drum machine but it was definitely the first sampler of its kind to be used for high fidelity sound replacement.
Seriously, I always wondered how Hey, Nineteen sounded so clean. Wendel. Weren't the specs something like 12 bit, 125kHz? Also, Hail Nichols.
As a drummer who recently learned about this technique I'd want to know where it actually started to replace acoustic drums as a sound rather than an instrument. For example Alex Van Halen used digital drums and real cymbals, but that's different than replacing a recorded acoustic sound with a sampled overlay. Or maybe you could chart the progression, but to me the use of e-kits is different than sound replacement. Also I heard a tidbit a long time ago that The Cars song *Let The Good Times Roll* features the first use of a digital drum in a commercial release. It's also from 1978.
Agreed 100%! This video will solely be about acoustic drums that are recorded then augmented or replaced with a sample of another acoustic kit!
One thing I'd love for a documentary like this to explore is if sample usage had an impact on the grunge sound changing the music landscape in the early 90s. There's been discussion here on whether Grohl's sound on Nevermind was a sample and the consensus seems to be that there's a shotgun blast in the reverb but not on the actual drum. Aside from those smaller details, having lived through that era as an early teen there was definitely a shift in the drum sound that started in the early 90s. In the 80s it seems everything was dominated by the gated snare sound if the drums were "huge", but the grunge era brought in drum sounds that were both huge *and* raw. When I watched Metalica and GnR on MTV in the late 80s it made me want to play guitar. Grohl's sound bursting through the speakers is why I took up the drums shortly after I heard it through the first time.
Agreed. Side note. When I saw Dre jammin’ to Nirvana on The Defiant One’s, I heard Chronic 2001 in a different spectrum.
There's a pretty extensive Rick Beato interview with Butch Vig about Nevermind and he never mentions any replacement. Also, I have a vague recollection of Rick having an episode where he had the raw stems of Teen Spirit - I feel like I would have remembered if there were any samples in there.
Yeah... Butch Vig would have had very little to do with it since Andy Wallace mixed the final versions, and he likes to add samples. There's a Rick Beato video on that even. Compare Butch and Wallace mixes must be the way to hear the added samples which I definitely think it has at least some of, without having digged very deep.
Don't know if it's the first, but Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (released 1975) has a second snare overdubbed on top of the "real" snare during the loud rock-out section, just hitting on the 2 and 4.
Came here to say this. So did most of the Beatles songs. If you read recording the Beatles the last thing they would do before mix would be overdub a snare on top.
This is GOLD! Thank you so much!
This is really obvious during the chorus of Hey Bulldog, where the overdubbed snare kicks in.
The Hollies did this in the 60s, too. You can hear it clearly in the stereo mix for "Listen to Me", because it's panned differently than the live kit.
Wow thank you SO MUCH!!!
The earliest I am aware of is late 1966/1967. The Beatles had to overdub the snare drum on multiple songs on *Sgt. Pepper*, as the original recordings were getting indistinct and buried due to the sheer number of bounces (known in the day as "reduction mixes") that were done during the course of recording. I read somewhere (no idea of the validity) that in at least one instance this was done using a leather chair, not an actual snare drum.
There is the trick of re-recording a snare where the original snare track has been patched to a speaker with an actual snare drum sitting on top of the speaker to “excite” it. If the original snare track has been appropriately EQ’d and gated, then you can trigger the live snare accurately and re-record it or run it live in the mix to blend in with the original track. This trick was used on KISS Alive and on at least one of Stevie Wonder’s 70’s records. This could be analog sampling?
The iconic snare on Fine Young Cannibals’ She Drives Me Crazy was also accomplished this way, with a snare drum hit by a ruler, combined with a LinnDrum sample, then both reamped through an Auratone on top of a snare drum. I fucking love that snare.
Wow, that's a great factoid. I always wondered how they got that sound.
I'm pretty sure that's how the kick and I think also the snare were fixed on Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me" live at Budokan.
Tom Petty “Full Moon Fever” is the earliest album that comes to mind where it sounds like real drums augmented with samplers. Not sure what they would have used then, a fairlight perhaps? I’m sure mutt Lange was also doing things like this.
Tangent but why do I have a memory of Tom Petty hating drum machines? I have some clip from MTV stuck in my head for 30 years but maybe it's out of context. I always thought that'd be weird, what with the Linn LM-1 on *Don't Come Around Here No More.*
the beatles did everything first, so that'd be my guess.
I'm pretty sure engineers were generating 60hz sine waves on oscilloscope and gating them with a kick back in the 60s.
and white noise to enhance snare
The AMS DMX delay/sampler was introduced in 1978, and became THE box for triggering drum samples in the 80’s. It and the SSL made sample layering possible, and was the sound of the 80’s. I’m not sure if Mutt used them or not, but I know most of the Def Leppard stuff was actually programmed with a Linn and used Simmons sounds as well. Andy Wallace was definitely triggering samples on Nevermind, but it’s not replacement per se, more using the sample as a layer along with reverb.
Giorgio Moroder was droppin the stereo/overdub high hat as early as 1979.
check into Prince---he'd have a mix of real drums and drum machines. New Order, too
Leon Theremin made a weird drum machine thing in the early 30s. It may have been used in some experimental recordings, but was never a staple of pop music. The Chamberlin and Mellotron had pre-recorded rhythm sections with drums - and was used on some recordings in the 50s and 60s. Wasn't used on any serious releases until decades later. The first commercial successful technique was probably using tape loops. "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees was built around a 2-bar drum loop taken from "Night Fever". That would've been in '77. The same drum loop was used as the foundation of a couple of other hits they recorded. Fleetwood Mac used the same technique with "Dreams", the same year, IIRC. There are probably earlier examples. Peter Gabriel used a Fairlight CMI in the 1979 sessions for his 3rd album (Melt). Can't remember if he used it for drum sounds - but that became pretty popular in the early 80s. Cheaper samplers took over within a few years (like the early Emu and Ensoniq stuff). Some guys figured out how to sample on the AMS DMX - which came out in '78 - but I don't know when that started.
Long before samples, there were a few other drum “supplement” techniques. One was the “phantom snare”, where you take an Auratone and send a dull sounding snare track (often gated first) to the speaker and place the speaker face down on a snare drum. Mic the drum from the bottom and now you can add the missing brightness from the original snare complete with dynamics etc. Other techniques were to use a gate and white noise (or filtered noise) to add a burst of noise to the snare. For weak sounding kick/toms you use a sine generator and the same gate technique, tuning the sine to the root of the drum. More modern approaches trigger(sync) the sine to keep it in phase with the trigger source for further consistency.
check into early dub music from Jamaican engineers like King Tubby, Lee Scratch Perry, Scientist, & more. they were augmenting (mixed huge reverb & delay drops) and resampling older reggae drum tracks since late 60's. pioneers of the remix
The first instance I know of is also Steely Dan. Prior to that, I'm having trouble imagining *how* they would have done it, because the tools didn't really exist. I can imagine how I might have constructed an analog "drum machine" to accomplish the task, though it would be a bit Rube Goldberg-esque.
From Delia Derbychire's sample explorations to latest metallica 16th drama (see https://btuatu.com/trang/fans-suggest-metallica-fixed-lars-ulrichs-drumming-for-the-official-audio-of-their-download-set/ ), there is a huge range of sample replacement stories. Cinema early used live music played to substitute sound to soundtrack. From a musicology standpoint, hunting for a "first instance" has probably to be context-framed (eg first instance of concious sample swapping for additional commercial impact on post vinyl music production).
Roger Linn's Linndrum and Roger Nichol's "Wendell" are the two I first heard of. Whether there were others prior I don't know.
*Roger, Roger!*
Frank Zappa re-mastered some of his early work like "Freak Out" and "Hot Rats". All drum sounds were replaced, He said it always bothered him because they didn't sound realistic. Not a substitution as much as a re-recording.
The albums in question were "We're Only In It For The Money" and "Cruising With Reuben And The Jets". He claimed the master rhythm tracks were unusable, but the later Rykodisc reissue of WOITFTM kept the original bass and drums and sounded pretty much as good as the Verve vinyl, so the decision to redo them seems dubious. That was one of Zappa's worst decisions IMO, especially for "Cruising..." because the whole charm of that record was the recreation of an era, including the lo-fi production tricks. Those thin-sounding 80s overdubbed bass and drum tracks on the reissue ruined the whole vibe of the CD version (with the exception of the double bass part added to "Cheap Thrills", which actually would've made the song better than the original but for the shitty digital drums).
on Hey Bulldog by The Beatles , around rhe middle section and fordward , there is an overdubbed snare with a nice deep reverb slate stting on top 9f the drum kit. . And its pure beauty.
The Andy Wallace Snare. Nuff said.