Roger Linn interview, Part II
The second part of an epic conversation with the man who changed drum machines
If you’re going to write a book about drum machines, then one of the most important people you could possibly interview is Roger Linn. His drum machines changed the landscape of popular music during the Eighties, Nineties, and beyond. They also reinvented the field of music technology, anticipating and making possible many of the composing and recording techniques we now take for granted.
This is Part II of a conversation from September 2020. In this segment, we talk about the end of Linn Electronics, Roger Linn's groundbreaking collaboration with Akai, and the future of the standalone drum machine.
Something I think is really interesting is what a short run standalone drum machines had, when you think back on it. Even though most people still know what a drum machine is, their reign took up such a small window of time.
I think a lot of it was just great, lucky timing for me. It was the zeitgeist. Technology was entering our lives. The personal computer revolution started in 1975, and it was starting to pervade every element of our lives. Computers were in microwaves ovens. They were in cars. They were in musical instruments now, and all of a sudden, musical instruments started to have all of these new capabilities that had not existed before. And so, it was the zeitgeist, and when it came to music, everyone was saying, “How can I--these things are so cool, they’re so new--how can I squeeze good music out of these things?” I think I’m lucky that the timing was right.
Have you ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers? You know that chapter about people born in 1955? I was born in 1955, as was Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Eric Schmidt, and a long list of other people. The idea that Gladwell presents is that if you were born in 1955 or thereabouts, then when the microcomputer revolution hit in 1975, you’re old enough that you just weren’t still stuck in high school and you weren’t yet old enough to have a family and kids and settle down. You couldn’t take risks, so it was the perfect time for people to take risks. He gives examples throughout history of times where people were born at the right time to be able to have an advantage, whether it was the railroads or the industrialization or something like that. And so, it was great timing. If I had been born five years later, I would’ve missed that.
Now I would say I’ve got some talent, sure, and I happen to have two interests that happen to combine very well. But a whole lot of it was just the luck of the draw.
I would say, just to add on to that, these technologies added a lot of capabilities to music. As computers were introduced to all of our lives inside appliances and different sorts, in music, people can immediately see the power for this--for sample drum machines. At the time, there were drummers who were known for their ability to keep a very steady beat, and drum machines could not but help keep a very steady beat. That was something where technology affects art. Same was when the camera was first invented. Portrait painters were out of a job, and you had to become an Impressionist. You know, you had to add something the camera couldn’t do. Any time a technology comes along, creative people find a new use for it.
It’s the same thing with music. If you just have a drummer who is very good about just playing or repeating a beat, you didn't get as much work. But people who were just programming things that a human couldn’t do got more work, and putting in sequences, or getting new sounds that were exciting to hear; new synthesizer sounds. So people were rushing to adapt these new skills and sounds on a recording, and suddenly you have these duo bands; the star and the nerd, and it worked out great. For example, take the Eurythmics. You had Annie Lennox and the guy who was more behind the curtain, you know? Dave Stewart.
The third of the Linn machines was the Linn 9000, and it’s this machine that really seems to predict the future—the drum machine that actually does other things. The forerunner of the digital audio workstation.
Well, when I had made these machines, I was also a musician, somebody who could play. So I had my own little studio at home where I’d have my products there, and I knew I could sequence the drum parts. But I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could do the bass parts? Some keyboard parts too? What if I were to take some of the advantages of the drum machine, like the ability to automatically repeat notes, and apply that to playing pitched notes as well?” It made sense to extend the metaphor of looping and swing from drum beats, only to doing sequenced musical parts.
So the Linn 9000, that was the idea. I was trying to make something that encompassed those ideas. The problem I had was that I still wasn't a great production engineer. At this point, I wasn’t working with my mentor, Bob Easton, and that was a problem, because I had the skills. I thought I knew it all. I was, you know, a cocky kid.
Anyway, the Linn 9000, I had a team of people helping me with design. I was spending far too much money while I was ignoring the existing sales, and eventually it was too complex. That caused unreliability, and so there were major breakdowns in the field. That caused my reputation to suffer, and finally it came down to the company.
And stupid me, you know, I discontinued--when I first made the LM-1, then when I made the LinnDrum--I discontinued the LM-1, and almost went out of business because of that. People said, “I still want the LM1,” and I said, “Why would you want it? It’s more expensive. So what if you’ve got a few tuning knobs?” But I had no awareness of what people wanted. I just wanted to focus on what was interesting to me. And then after the LinnDrum, I discontinued it, thinking everyone would want to buy the Linn 9000, which was another stupid move.
Here’s a funny story: at one of the NAMM shows, I saw Mr. Kakehashi, the founder of Roland. We had a very nice relationship because he’s actually, probably more than anybody else, the inventor of the drum machine. He made the first Ace Tone drum machine. That was his first company. You know, people call me the inventor of the drum machine. I’m not the inventor of the drum machine. I just made a slightly better drum machine. But at any rate, I went to the NAMM show, and I was talking to Kakehashi. My company, yet again, had its financial troubles. Taro--his name was Ikutaro, but I used to call him Taro, and I said, “Taro, what am I doing wrong?” And he said, “Fundamental rule of business: you must bring in more money than go out.” (Laughs) And it was funny, but even funnier was the fact that I didn’t even consider that. I just thought, “People will always buy what I want because it’s so cool.” But it didn’t happen that way.
You know, at one point, I had 55 employees and a massive monthly expense, at around age 26. And things just crashed and burned after that. The company went out of business, I think, when I was 29, 30. Something like that.
Yet many people have told me that the Linn 9000, for all its flaws, was the ultimate drum machine. People stayed loyal for a long time—some are to this day!
Well, I think it’s “great ideas support implementation.” You know, for example, it was the first time having pressure-sensitive pads, and there were some attempts that would register the force of your strike, but they didn’t work all that well. By using pressure, I was able to not only sense more accurately strike levels, but also implement this feature for the first time called “note repeat,” which generally comes with Roland drum machines now too.
And the idea as a drum machine user--you know this--you vary the pressure on the pad while the note repeat function is on, and you can get it to do repeated, discreet notes. You know [imitates a cymbal roll]. It’s a very useful way to create sixteenth-note or eighth-note hi-hat part that you couldn’t play as easily with your fingers or repeated strikes. And even random pressure on there creates that variation of dynamics that’s very useful. And a pressure-sensitive product has enabled that. It’s always kinda funny to me ‘cause, you know, a few years back a company came out with their product called Push, and people said, “Wow! What an innovation: pressure sensitive pads!” You know, yeah, sure. I did that, like, 30 years ago.
After Linn Electronics went out of business, you teamed up with Akai and made a series of machines that, you could argue, became even more influential.
Ah, it was kind of an obvious choice, surely. Akai had seen my success in drum machines. They had seen there was demand for something like the Linn 9000 or the mini-studio. In other words, a well-engineered machine that could do drum beats and maybe sequencing. The process was a little bit faster at that time, and they recognized it. They had good production engineering. They just didn’t have as many creative engineers, so what they did is they partnered with design engineers around the world with me on the drum machines, with a guy named Mike Mathews who had a company called Electro-Harmonix. They partnered with a very creative designer in LA named Miles Steiner, and so they had these wonderful little partnerships with people.
It was important to get some creative products with people who really understood the market well, and in part to also educate their engineers so that they would be better skilled in creating products for their creative market, ‘cause they were people mostly who had applied to the electronics company. They would make musical instrument products. They saw a new market.
One of the great stories of the MPC series—and of other sampling drum machines of this time—is the way that hip hop producers, in particular, found a way to repurpose the sampling memory available—to use it for loops, rather than to sample individual drum sounds. Do you remember a particular recording that made you aware of this use of your technology?
I don’t recall a particular recording. I just remember one point someone at a NAMM show saying, “Okay, this instrument is great. You’ve got the 13 seconds [of sampling time], and it’s expanded to 26 seconds. But is it possible to getting the standard up more than that?” I said, “How much do you want?” He said, “I don’t know. Two, three minutes of stereo?” I said, “You’re crazy. What would you wanna do that for?” He said, “Because I’m sick and tired of recording. I can use that as a basis for this loop for my new record.”
And it was a complete surprise to me. As was the whole hip hop audience for my drum machines. I didn’t know anybody in hip hop, and a lot of the ways they used it were different than I had anticipated. It's like I said before: you make the brush, but the painter decides what to paint with it.
How did the relationship with Akai develop after the success of the MPC60?
I think the first hint of trouble came… They recognized--lemme get this right. They had to reduce their expenses. I think at first, it didn’t matter how much they spent, but [eventually] they needed to be more profitable, and my product was the driver in the company. You know, the accountants got in. They were in there and said, “Hmm. Paying Linn this royalty, uh… why don’t we not? I have an idea! Let’s not pay him this royalty!”
And so they started to get a little bit, uh, dishonest. They were trying to mince words and try to reinterpret words in the contract and all that sort of stuff. They just tried to weasel out of it, and I even offered to take less. They were just trying to get rid of me because I had shared the source code with them. Because it was a collaborative adventure. I thought, that’s fine. But you know, naive me. So they just figured they could do it themselves, and eventually, what they did, is they thought that they would just rewrite the entire source code just to make their own machines. [I] reminded them when they were about to sell it that my designs were protected in the contract, and so they finally acquiesced. They paid my royalties, but it was a bit of a difficult time there.
Of course, computers begin to enter the scene in the late Eighties, and that really changes everything as far as music-making is concerned—including drum machines.
Well, I think at the time--and this is still true, I think—for the people who were more dweeb-y-- y’know for the Dave Stewart of the band, whoever the dweeb guy was, who immersed himself in all the technology—it made much more sense to be on a computer. But there were problems. You know, the operating systems didn’t necessarily like to do music. There were problems in latency. There were problems in timing in earlier computers, and there were problems in the software. People were still figuring it out. And there were bugs, and it’s hard to write good music software because it’s real time, and it has to do a lot inside. It has to do a lot of thinking to be able to do the work it has to do.
A lot of musicians who had more talent in the musical area, but not in the technical area, it was difficult for them, because they would find that their creative flow was constantly being interrupted by some software driver, or operating system problem, or something like that. They wanted a machine that just did music, and if you think about it, it makes the most sense.
I think eventually, things will move back to appliances. Dedicated synthesizers, dedicated musical products of all types, just as it’s been for centuries. But in the interim, while computers were expensive—even though they’re getting cheaper now—while they were expensive, and are expensive--it makes sense to take advantage of that thing you’re using for all kinds of other things anyway, to do your music. That way, it handles all your storage, all your transportation of files, all your backup, your ability to see a lot of data at one point, and it had great advantages.
But I think the argument is still going on today: there’s still a lot of people that just want hardware, and I’ve kinda come to the conclusion that it’s virtually genetic. I think some people just have the hardware gene turned on, and some people just have the virtual gene turned on. And some people are completely comfortable, as I am, touching a slider on a screen--a picture of a slider or turning the picture of a knob--and some people, it just does not, they do not got that. They want a real knob, and they want a real slider, and they want realcircuits. They want analog circuits. And it’s a philosophical issue, I think. Apart from the practicalities of it, some people spend infinite amounts of money to have things that would be free in software. It’s already on the computer.
Tell me about the Tempest, your recent drum machine collaboration with Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits.
Well, I think the basic metaphor is… the basic way of working is the same. Loop recording, with quantization, with swing, and good sounds. But in this case, this wasn't targeted for the MPC players, to download all their own sample libraries and all that sort of stuff. This was targeted moreso for Dave Smith consumers who wanted synthesis, but they also wanted the drum machine. You know, it’s Dave who’s for synthesis and analog synthesis. I’m known for drum machines, so it was an analog drum machine. For those people, I think it served them very well.
For my end of things, from the drum machine side of it—it had nothing to do with synthesis. I noticed that in various aspects of society, the processes of creation, entertainment, and performance were all getting mixed up into one. You know for example, perhaps in the Sixties, the executive would dictate a letter to his secretary. Then he’d make some edits, and then they’d send it off, right? But now, people just type an email, and they edit it as they type. Actually, to edit is better for people with disabilities; with speaking in complete sentences, they can be able to at least edit while they type. And language has suffered, but communication has flourished, in a sense: in the death of punctuation, the death of capital letters. But anybody can communicate now.
In various areas of our lives, those areas are often mixed up: composing, creating, and editing a performance as well, or the release of whatever that is. So in music it’s the same thing, and I’ve noticed with electronic music products, performance started to include creation and editing. Now creation has always been involved in a musical performance: in the early days of [jazz] improvisation, of course. So what people were doing was instead of just looping and creating a beat, and then editing it in the program of the beat, they would do this as part of their live performance: create loops and add parts to them. The reward was in the journey for the audience member. In other words, it became more interesting in seeing the painting actually being painted than just to go to the museum and actually see the painting.
In Tempest, what I tried to do is create a real-time operating system even more than I had in my earlier machines. That was always a part of my philosophy, the idea that you just start playing—and it’s a two-bar loop, and it comes back, and your errors or timing [are] corrected, and the swing has been added. But this took it a little bit further than that. You create beats, then you switch to a different beat, and hearing them, you create another beat. It would never stop. You can arrange those, and all that sort of stuff. So the idea of it was, it was supposed to be a drum machine for drum machine virtual assistance. People wanted to play live and create drum beats. I’m not saying I wasn’t behind that.
The MPC, to enter a recording, you had to stop your recording, move memory around, and then you would create the beat, and you could sequence the beats in real time after, but you couldn’t record a beat, then go immediately to playing another beat, and start recording another beat, and so on and so forth. So that was the main idea behind the real time OS of Tempest: never stop.
Do you have some favorite songs that have used your drum machines?
Yeah, there are ones. I liked what Prince did. I’m very proud of The Human League’s song, and I’m very proud of what Jeff Porcaro programmed… the Elton John record.
As far as what I like now, it’s--I’m 65, and like most people, good music is music that sounds like music that was happening between the ages of 15 and 25. Everything else at that point becomes bad music if it’s different, or good music that sounds the same. (Laughs) There’s an element in that in my tastes, and I tend to listen to softer music now. I tend to value human music because to me, the human spirit is more than the triumph of the machine, the spirit of the machine.
The other thing, too, is I created drum machines because I was trying to make a machine that sound at least as close to the drummers that I would’ve loved to have played with, but wasn’t good enough to at the time. And so, you know, I remember going to see Return to Forever, and Lenny White just blew my mind. And Billy Cobham, or Narada-Michael Walden, or any of these guys, or Jeff Porcaro. When it comes to drums, those are just things that I really like the most.
Now at the same time, I like a great groove. If a good drummer is in there, or a good drum machine, as long as there’s other things involved, like percussion, for variation and humanity, I like it. If there’s a groove there that’s happening, with the right combination playing with the right group, you cannot not move. It just moves your body. It’s something that is infectious, and you can’t stop it.
Great drummers have that ability to create those great grooves, particularly when the musicians are just in sync and the heavens are in alignment and everything works. In my music producing history, I have more of those moments with human drummers than with drum machines.