BEAT GEMS – Drum Machines in Modern Music
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€75,00 - Regular price
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€75,00
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A visually rich journey through the drum machines that changed music — from early rhythm boxes and preset companions to programmable classics, sampling workstations, genre-defining icons, and modern hardware revivals.
- 336 pages in full color
- 100+ drum machines featured (65+ in detail)
- Exclusive photography and insights
- Foreword by Jeff Mills
- Dimensions: 25 x 25 cm (9.6 x 9.6 inches).
- Hardcover coffee table-style book in full color
- Printed in Denmark on premium FSC paper
BEAT GEMS is a premium hardcover book from Bjooks that explores this remarkable history through rare and iconic machines, vivid photography, artist stories, technical insight, and the people who turned boxes of circuits into culture. The book explores more than six decades of electronic music history through the drum machines that changed the way music is made, recorded, and performed.
An inspiring and visually rich book for anyone interested in music technology, design, rhythm, and recording culture, this comprehensive work follows the evolution of drum machines from early experiments and preset rhythm companions to programmable icons, studio powerhouses, genre-defining classics, and the hardware revival of recent decades. The project structure already maps that story across eight major stages – from invention and standardization to creative misuse, programmability, studio control, genre definition, and rebirth.
The book presents comprehensive research, writing, editing, photography, and visual development by author Oli Freke and editor Kim Bjørn.
Readers can expect a wide-ranging journey through the circuits, sounds, ideas, and visual character of drum machines across generations of instruments and makers.
BEAT GEMS features detailed photography alongside historical context, design analysis, artist connections, engineering stories, and a broad view of the instruments that helped drive electronic, pop, hip-hop, house, techno, post-punk, and experimental music forward.
It is a book for lovers of electronic music, drum machines, music history, industrial design, photography, recording, studio culture, and timeless printed books.
BEAT GEMS is organized as a journey through the development of drum machines, grouped into clear thematic stages that make the bigger story easy to follow while allowing each instrument to keep its own identity. The current structure moves through invention, standardization, creative misuse, programmability, studio control, integrated production systems, genre-defining machines, and the later hardware revival.
BEAT GEMS brings together a remarkable cast of drum machines from across more than six decades of electronic rhythm. Early pioneers such as the Wurlitzer Side Man, Ace Tone Rhythm Ace FR-1, Seeburg Rhythm Prince, Keio Mini Pops 7, Elka Drummer One, and Maestro Rhythm King show how rhythm machines began as accompaniment tools, only to take on lives of their own
From there, the story moves into programmability, studio control, and bolder electronic sound through landmarks such as the Eko ComputeRhythm, CR-78, LM-1, LinnDrum, Oberheim DMX, Drumulator, and Akai MPC60 — machines that helped move drum programming from the sidelines to the center of music production.
No family is more iconic than Roland’s TR line — from the TR-808 and TR-909 to the TR-606 and TR-707 – instruments that became inseparable from hip-hop, house, techno, electro, and pop. Alongside them are classics from Sequential, E-mu, Korg, Yamaha, Alesis, Elektron, and JoMoX, showing how drum machines evolved from preset boxes into genre-defining creative tools.
