Contents - Beth Lesser

The Digital Dynamic Duo
- Steely and Clevie
Up until the 1985 “digital revolution”, drum machines and other preset
instruments had generally been incorporated into a band consisting of
human musicians playing guitars, organ, horns etc. Now, after Sleng Teng,
producers realized that they needed only the keyboard player. He could program
all of the parts that required multiple musicians – drums, horns, percussion,
guitar – all on the one instrument. Everyone else was redundant.
“In Jamaica, we Jamaicans kinda of have a thing whe’ anything we do we
go to the extreme,” Explains Clevie (aka Cleveland Browne, the other half of
‘Steely and Clevie’). “We don’t just drink a whole heap of beer; we drinks cases
of beer. A man don’t just smoke some weed, him smoke a whole heap of weed.
Man don’t have a girl, him have a whole heap of girl. So it’s just an extreme
thing where [computer rhythms] took over. It’s like the peer pressure thing. A
lot of musicians bought drum machines and they start programming stuff.”
Many newly unemployed musicians remained adamantly opposed to
computerized music making, both for economic and aesthetic reasons, and
not without some justification. “Everything was cool until the mid eighties
when the machines came in,” Drummer Santa Davis contends. “That is where
things kinda of start going to hell in a hand bag. It used to be a thing where
the singer and the musician have an interaction in the studio. Now there is no
real interaction between musicians and singer. The music start to get sterile or
mechanical because you don’t have real people playing the music.”
Despite his renown for, and expertise in, digital music, Clevie understood
this more than anyone. “If you write out a bass line and give it to two different
bass players to play live, it might come out with two different feel, because
if you zoom in to the actual, the exact beat on which the player plays, some
players play a little ahead. Some play a little behind, some laid back, some
are directly on the beat. Some notes you might be on the beat, and some off.
That’s what creates the difference, and the velocity, how loud you pluck, which
finger you play the bass with, your thumb or your forefinger. All of that adds
to the creation of feel. I believe that we loose that when we get too much into
quantized programming.”
STeely and Clevie
Although, at first, as many people abhorred the new trend as loved it, the
computer revolution did have one immediate benefit - the increasing incidence
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