039/ A finger-drumming (r)evolution
I’m behind the curve on it, but mildly obsessed with this generation of club artists who sing and DJ both at once, and who’ve turned ‘finger drumming’ into a new musicianship.
It’s not a niche. Major names like Fred again, Nia Archives, Kenya Grace, are part of a world that is artfully re-imagining the centrepiece structure of a live show. You know, the DJ booth, or electronica boffin-style table of gizmos, sits high up, in the middle of the stage, with the star behind it controlling the music. But now they’re happy to leg it down from there to the front, and sing and bop about the stage like a pop performer. DJ and club PA star, both at the same time. It ties in to the (now long-established) way that technically gifted artists showcase work, via the Tik Toks, reels and YouTubes, alone at home, informal, constructing jams live on camera. Pyjamas, laptop, sample trigger pads, bit of eyeliner, some great tunes, and bang, you’re top of the charts and booked for Glastonbury. *
Meanwhile, a big part of this DJ/singer crossover performance is playing — and live looping — individual beat samples with your fingers, like you’re drumming. Finger-drumming. Here lies a cute generation gap thing. I can imagine anyone under a certain age going yeah of course Chris, it’s not even new, while anyone above a certain age goes what the actual fuck are you talking about?
Take the prodigiously talented posh lad superstar (and Brian Eno’s bff) Fred again.. (sidebar: this fella never had any problems purchasing the gear he needs — Fred’s grandad is a sir and his dad is a KC, so let’s acknowledge that Fred never had to do anything, except whatever he wanted. But anyway…) here’s Fred blowing the enthusiastic mind of Zane Lowe, demonstrating how he blends drones, beats and collected vocal samples with some deft, intense rhythmic finger-drumming. Skip to 38 minutes in for, erm, Fred’s peak virtuoso fingering and Zane’s ecstatic reaction.
Brand new, this (very solid ‘main character energy’) piece of equipment, Native Instruments’ Maschine, can be scored for a grand or less, though of course one requires various accoutrement around it to make it work, a decent laptop and so on.
Here’s how Fred’s performance looks, transferred to the big stage — vast crowd — of his Glastonbury set last year. Live, Fred (who is clearly a total sweetheart) mostly performs in a duo format, with another lauded London artist, DJ Tony Friend (Modestep) backing him up. Ronson to his Bowie.
Recently I found myself in the market for this sort of a box. Initially, I was hunting a more sober sample triggering device, no sexy flashing lights, probably at about a third of the price. The primary goal was to play out samples onstage at Jim Bob shows. Currently I trigger them via the stage piano, directly off a USB that remains plugged in the back of the keyboard. Stupidly, it’s the same button to trigger all the different samples — and you have to scroll a menu to locate the correct one. Obviously, this setup is fraught with risk. Never mind the USB crashing or getting mislaid between gigs, or the keyboard rebooting: even if everything works fine, if I forget to cue a sample during a gap between songs, or I don’t have time for some reason, I’m screwed. My punishment is the sheer panic of trying to scroll through the menu, while at the same moment playing whatever the song’s keyboard part is. This has happened more than once.
So I was in the market for a sampler, and was focused on something sensible, when I fell in love with this gorgeous beast. It’s got nothing to do with good sense. Even if Jim never tours with a band again, I’ve got to have it. Perhaps it’s the coloured flashing coloured lights. Or the sheer power of what this box can achieve. But more likely, it’s the finger-drumming.
Here’s Kenya Grace at home, singing her beautiful ethereal ballad, ‘Afterparty Lover’. No question, playing a groovebox like this, as an accompanying instrument, is as genuine a form of musicianship as any guitar shredding or piano soloing. Again, transfer her to the live stage and you get a sense of the layout: Grace down the front singing her huge smash hit chart-topper ‘Strangers’ to close her set at Glastonbury last month. With ‘Strangers’ Grace became the first British woman to have a completely solo (written, produced, performed) number one hit, since Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’.
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In my teens, early-to-mid 1990s, proto-Britpop starting to poke through, I vividly remember a conversation in a café with musician friends about how we’d perform music if money and time were no object — and making the group laugh (quite a lot) at me, as I clumsily tried to explain how part of a live set might be drumming on pads with my fingers, to augment loops, and then singing along. It wasn’t a new idea for me: back in 1990, for GCSE music, I’d handed in a composition entirely constructed on the Roland R5 Human Rhythm Composer (and got marked 100% for it, hem hem) which included an artificial looseness, achieved with finger-drumming.
This gorgeously clumpy, early midi drumbox from the late 1980s has sixteen chunky touch-sensitive tappable rectangle pads structured very similarly to how they still are today, on many modern boxes, including the Maschine. Even the factory settings are on roughly equivalent pads, so for example snare and kick drums and hi-hats have not really moved from the pad they were assigned to, through generation after generation of technological change, over a quarter of a century. The R5 has a solid internal sequencer, so you could program complex songs and even re-arrange them on the hoof. The same core functionality that, albeit refined, still sits at the heart of this software and hardware.
Everything changes but nothing changes.
At school, of course I never owned one — way too expensive. I barely had a viable guitar. The acoustic guitar I ‘played’ back then, I’d pulled out of a music department dustbin (where they’d binned eight bust guitars at once) and ham-fistedly attempted to fix up, very rudimentary DIY skills, swapped the strings around because I was a leftie. It just about played. Woe is me. I would be in my twenties, in full time work, signed to a record deal and on album three, before I actually owned a decent acoustic guitar and a decent electric guitar.
Even more stupidly, I didn’t own a good stage piano until after I’d quit the T-T career altogether. I treasure it now, play it all the time, but only bought one to play in Jim Bob’s band, never my own solo tours. Terrible self-sabotaging mentality.
When I was a musician I couldn’t afford to be a musician. Now I’m not, I can.
Anyway, back at school, my most synth-literate music-making friend Alex had one of these dreamy Roland R5 drumboxes. I can’t remember how, but I must’ve been able to borrow or steal it for a decent amount of time, because I learned the thing inside out. When I watch Fred or Kenya, or countless lesser known artists, in videos like these, I viscerally remember that feeling of learning the bit of gear right down into its insides, until you play it, really play it, exactly like a piano or bass guitar or flute.
A lifetime later — probably 1998 — working in a London office job, my coolest colleague Kevin spotted a Roland R5 on eBay. Kev won the auction for me and I got it for a hundred quid. It became a bedrock of early Chris T-T recordings: it’s all over my homemade (pre-software) first album Beatverse, sometimes obviously a machine, sometimes pretending to be a real kit. I had only one microphone, so it was logical to programme most drums, then add live elements — hi-hat, shakers, a borrowed snare — to patterns, to give the track a live feel. It’s remarkable, listening back twenty-five years later, the R5 sounds righteous.
But it never came onstage with me, not once. I wonder why. Early solo gigs involved heavy use of effects on electric guitar, but never a keyboard or a drum machine to augment anything or add rhythm. I wonder what I was scared of.
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I’ve always been a fidgeter. It’s been channeled into creativity to an extent, but still, what an antisocial habit, tapping and clicking all day, forcibly applying one’s inner rhythms to the outside world, regardless other people’s ears. Even typing this, a pause to think can quickly get hijacked by syncopated rhythms, tapped out with knuckles and fingertips onto knees, wooden table, nearby objects. I can’t play drums beyond a basic standard. Occasionally gaining access to a kit (band practice tea break, for example) like any non-drummer, I’ll just smash a bit of four-to-the-floor shit out of the things as hard as I can for a few moments, scratch the itch, then wisely leave it alone with my head ringing and a cheesy grin. But I do have genuinely decent underlying rhythm, and the counterplay of beat and time I find instinctive and easy. So perhaps I ought to have spent my music career doing more beatsy stuff, right? Too late to think about that now but never too late to have a play.
The Roland R5 Human Rhythm Composer still lives in our attic, still works fine, shamefully dusty right now. It may come downstairs for the first time in decades, as the attic becomes an art room. And I’m gonna get me one of these lovely Maschine boxes, though, goddamnit. Soon as I have the spare cash. Soon as my head isn’t turned by a big painting of a slice of chocolate cake at Helm Gallery, or an Arvon residential non-fiction writing course, or a trip to Japan. This beautiful box will sit perfectly with the stage piano and laptop, part of some kind of Kwiksave Nils Frahm / Jon Hopkins type shenanigan. Maybe I’ll put the Roland R5 next to it, old enough to be its grandpa.
icymi —
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• Clicktracking the crazy timing bit of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite Of Spring’ (FB reel)
• Bonny Light Horseman sing ‘When I Was Younger’ on CBS Mornings
• Dave Simpson interviews electro pioneers The Grid in The Guardian
• YouTuber musicologist battle: Fantano demolishes Rick Beato
• Very rare new song from wonderful Norfolk singer Jess Morgan
Thank you for reading, it means a lot.
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* We might not be comfortable admitting it — especially out in that community fighting for the UK’s grass-roots music circuit — but to a serious extent, YouTube and Tik Tok have replaced early career touring, as the route to music success. It’s entangled with the influencer world. I reluctantly agree with those arguing that bands — a group of mates learning to play together — are far less a central part of music-making than before. Like it or not, far fewer kids go in a garage with their friends and some drums and guitars, while many more kids learn to make beats and songs on Garageband and such, then put it on YouTube and Soundcloud. Indeed, even when you see bands breaking through, proportionally more often, they’re in fact a solo artist who’s hired players, or recruited friends, to back them. Sorry.