That’s why we chose to inaugurate this new, hip-hop-focused edition of RBMA’s Modern Approaches series with a discussion of drums as thorough as the creators who commit them to tape. The possibilities are endless, yet achieving the perfect crack or thump is a matter of almost life-or-death importance. It’s not surprising, then, that drums represent a sort of holy grail for fledgling producers as well as perhaps the most complex, even esoteric aspect of making a track. The number of functions drums perform and qualities they evoke, in fact, is matched only by the variety of ways in which they can be made and manipulated, from banging on cans or lunchroom tables to meticulously layering the attack, decay and sustain from different recordings or digital files into the ultimate Frankenstein’s monster of a snare hit. They can rush the beat, drag behind to provide a lazy swing, stutter drunkenly or snap flawlessly to a robotic grid. They can instantly conjure the dust of a record library, the sweat of a dancefloor or the steel of an assembly line.

Those immersed in hip-hop love to make drums talk and then talk about drums: their timbre, their pattern, their national origins, their spiritual powers, their distance from the microphone and the emotions and visual associations they summon. Appropriately, drums have earned a unique level of reverence within hip-hop, frequently commanding pride of place in the mixdown and consuming the most time in any conversation between producers or connoisseurs. This unequal division of labor is only intensified within the realm of hip-hop, a musical culture which from its very inception has measured creative excellence via originality in using Other People’s Percussion. Timekeepers, storytellers, motivators, fighters and occasionally mind-alterers, drums are arguably tasked with more jobs and do more of the heavy lifting than any other single element of modern music. If drums were people, they might be the hardest working people in the music biz.

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