Captain Pikant Dismantles Blue Monday: Drum Machine Mayhem and DMX Wizardry

Let’s set the scene: Joy Division implodes, New Order rises, and by 1983 they drop ‘Blue Monday’—a track that doesn’t just hit, it detonates. Captain Pikant wastes no time reminding us how this tune became the unofficial national anthem for anyone who’s ever sweated through a warehouse party. The Oberheim DMX is front and centre, and Pikant’s not shy about calling it the hardest-hitting use of the box in music history.

But here’s the twist: ‘Blue Monday’ wasn’t even meant to be a crowd-pleaser. It was stitched together from bits of other songs, originally designed to troll audiences demanding an encore. That’s right—one of the most iconic beats of the ’80s started as a bit of a joke. Only New Order could turn a prank into a genre-defining banger.

Captain Pikant gets surgical with the Oberheim DMX, showing us how those infamous drums are built from the ground up. Forget the hardware? No problem—a plugin or samples will do, but Pikant’s quick to point out the DMX’s EPROM magic and subtle differences between the ’81 and ’83 models. The kick starts four-on-the-floor at 130.5 BPM, but it’s not enough. Pikant dials in extra punch with tape saturation and EQ, then stacks a bass synth pulse underneath—because Bernard Sumner thought the original kick was too wimpy.

The real trick? Giving the kick room to breathe with gated reverb, just like New Order did by re-amping through a speaker. Pikant’s processed version is all crunch and attitude, and he’s not afraid to push it to the edge. The result is a drum sound that’s more punch-in-the-face than polite handshake—exactly how it should be.

Here’s where Captain Pikant pulls back the curtain: New Order didn’t dream up every element of ‘Blue Monday’ from scratch. They cherry-picked the best bits from Donna Summer’s ‘Our Love’, Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel’, a Spaghetti Western riff, and even Kraftwerk’s ‘Uranium’. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of influences, and Pikant lays it out with a wink—proving that sometimes the best way to make history is to steal from everyone and do it better.

Pikant doesn’t just analyse—he rebuilds. The snare gets a full makeover with EQ, distortion, bitcrushing, and stereo widening, making it leap out of the speakers. Claps are doubled, hi-hats are swapped and tuned, and the infamous ‘whooping cough’ effect is recreated with a crash cymbal trick that’s as cheeky as it is effective. Pikant even addresses the DMX’s hardware limitations, showing how modern plugins and samplers can take things further than the original kit ever could.

He layers patterns, tweaks reverb, and uses delays to make the percussion sound more sophisticated than it has any right to be. There’s a Simmons SDSV emulation in the mix, some clever use of delays, and a machine-gun DMX tom fill that would make any 808 jealous. Pikant’s approach is all about pushing the sound until it’s on the verge of chaos—then pulling it back just enough to keep the groove tight.