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Wurlitzer Sideman
Gert Prix
Boom Chick Boom Boom Chick
My first encounter with a rhythm machine is still clear in my memory, a truly awful experience. September 1970 – someone was singing the names of the month on the radio, while in the background you could hear a soulless machine beating out the rhythm – 3/4 time in its most disgusting form. The cause of this aesthetic disaster was possibly the already well-known dispute in the house of Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb. Earlier, and again after the reconciliation, they went under the name of the Bee Gees, the song was called August, October. Had Robin mislaid the drummer for the solo project that had followed the dispute? Or was it just the urge to be innovatory? In any event, a rhythm machine had to stand in for the rhythmic backing to August, October.
The song is at best a marginalia in the history of pop music – in contrast to the Wurlitzer Sideman, which back in the late 1950s had begun the age of emotionless drummers. While the final acoustic product might not have been particularly impressive, its technical implementation was.
Groove is a cyclic event. Hence it was obvious to equip the Sideman with a circular disk divided radially into 48 sections – a convenient figure that allows the most important types of beats to be produced. These 48 sections with their contact points correspond to quantified note values that are read by a rotating comb. In contrast, the different percussion instruments are represented in concentric circles. A multistage switch interlinks this two-dimensional matrix to create rhythms.
Anyone who is not yet truly impressed by the technical implementation should examine the brilliantly simple but equally brilliantly efficient tempo control, a rubberized drive roll that finally gives the ridiculous formula C = 2rπ an understandable purpose. Depending on where the roll touches our circular disk with its many contact points, the transmission ratio changes and hence the speed. If this is too technical, take a look at the Sideman control panel and simply delight in the list of the rhythms available: bolero, beguine, foxtrot etc.
The Wurlitzer Sideman on display here only arrived at the Eboardmuseum a few years ago. A delightful accident meant that it came precisely from the region in which the German Wurlitzer branch is still located today. But the Sideman most probably never saw this factory from the inside, its place of its birth being Corinth in Mississippi, a town that played a major role in the 1862 Civil War.
The Sideman itself once almost triggered a conflict – in trade union circles. It was regarded as a serious threat to the demand for live drummers and percussionists, and a few years later a similar argument arose in connection with the mellotron. Both instruments, however, survived not only this organized animosity but many a decade as well, and today they are classics and coveted collector items.