BEAT GEMS - the new book on drum machines...

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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.

'When you follow the story of drum machines closely, you quickly realize they were never just timekeepers. Again and again, musicians took these machines somewhere their makers never expected — and in doing so, changed music.'

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.

However, the book also makes room for the stranger side of rhythm history: standalone clap boxes, Italian auto-accompaniment rarities such as the Godwin Drummaker MPS 88 and Elgam Crazy Band, curious hybrids with built-in rhythm units in mixers, radios, and cassette machines, and ’90s grooveboxes that tried to put dance music into a single box.

The book also reaches into the modern era, with makers such as Elektron, Roland, Akai, Vermona, JoMoX, Erica Synths, Soma Laboratory, and others showing how the drum machine continues to evolve."