Keeping e-drum history alive

Allan Leibowitz looks at a couple of newish books on oldish gear. Interest in the history of e-drums has been growing lately, with increasing participation in online groups and internet searches about “vintage gear”. While there’s a lot of chatter, nostalgia and anecdotal ‘information’ out there, few people have done more to highlight the progress of this sector of the music instrument market than Alex Graham, a New Zealand-based musical instrument collector and drum machine enthusiast. Graham has not only amassed one of the largest drum machine collections in the world, he has also documented his instruments – and scores of others he has discovered in his pursuit of the “full story of electronic drums”. digitalDrummer has recently been poring […]