The Null Device

No-Brand Funky Drummer

For a while in the 1980s and early 1990s, you couldn't turn a radio on without hearing something containing the Funky Drummer break, a short length of drumming taken from the eponymous James Brown B-side. Then PolyGram got wise to it and started shaking down anyone using this idiom for licensing fees, and it disappeared.

Now some modular synth hackers have taken up the challenge of replicating the Funky Drummer with a Nord Modular G2. A discussion thread is here (containing downloadable patches but little other info, so people not owning Nord Modular G2s are out of luck), and a MP3 of the reconstructed Funky Drummer is here. It sounds definitely recognisable as the Funky Drummer, though also noticeably different; perhaps one should think of it as the No-Brand Funky Drummer?

Now if someone could port this to, say, Pd or SuperCollider, and/or do versions replicating the Amen break or such from first principles, that would be even cooler.

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