In-depth Feature:
Industry Interview -Roger Linn
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Beats
SS: You are an accomplished guitarist, why a drum-machine?
RL: I didn't need a guitar machine. On my song demos, I could play guitar and bass and fake it on keyboards, but drums were always the hardest part to both play and record. The only drum machines at the time were non-programmable and sounded like crickets. I wanted to create something that sounded real and was programmable.
SS: I still use Linn sounds today, as do many people, what is it that made those sounds so special, and how did you create and sample them given that technology was still in it's infancy?
RL: In my opinion the sounds weren't that special. I just used common sounds of the day. If they seem special today, I think it's because they have become associated with special recordings. My sounds were 8 bit/27 kHz sampling rate recordings, which by today's standards is crap. They were full of digital noises, recorded with bad converters, and the only reason the toms and bass drums weren't full of noise is because my early machines had sweeping lowpass filters to remove the noise after the strike.
SS: What was it that made the Linn drum machines popular?
RL: At the time, there was nothing else that would do what it could do. I would show it to people and their eyes would light up when they heard real drum sounds coming from an electronic box. Also, I think my experience as a musician helped me make a product that had tight timing and was very useable by musicians.
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