Here's the one and only prototype of Roger Linn's Midistudio. It was announced at NAMM in 1986 as the replacement for the Linn 9000. That machine had velocity-sensitive pads, but the Midistudio added sampling, and put the pads into the famous 4x4 grid. This machine was the demo model used by the sales team, and it's for sale in the current Vemia auction - currently for £880. Linn went bust in 1986, the Midistudio was never manufactured, and Roger went to design for Akai, releasing the MPC 60 in 1988. It's great watching design evolve. This has the sliders from the Linn 9000, but the colour from the MPC. The cool removable control panel (a 100ft extension cable would have been available) didn't re-surface until the Akai S6000 from 1998, by which time the hardware sampler was all but dead.
This man is responsible for most of the records I love. He’s Roger Linn, who invented the MPC sampler (used by Dre and Timbaland and everyone else). But his first invention was the Linn LM1 drum machine, which Prince used on ‘Ballad of Dorothy Parker’ and ‘When Doves Cry’ and pretty much everything else he made during the glory years. By the time he made ‘Sign of The Times’, his LM-1 was already a retro rarity, and it already sounded ironic.
The LM-1 was the first drum machine to use samples (Roger Linn approached his friend Jeff Porcaro from Toto to provide the samples), and when it was launched in 1979, it cost $5,000. Only five hundred were ever made, and they don’t crop up on Ebay too often. But don’t worry, all the LM1 sounds are available in Akai sample format at the wonderful Hollow Sun archive. And they’re free.
There’s a great, epic, discussion of Prince, his customised Linn collection, and the mysterious ‘Kuh’ sound here. (That site is now completely dead. Here's the relevant discussion, culled from the Google cache. The format is all messed up, but it should work: LINK)
CLICK FOR MORE PRINCE
At the moment it's just a render on a poster on the Dave Smith Instruments stand at NAMM, but this could be the new drum machine from Dave Smith (of Sequential Circuits, man behind the Prophet 5, Pro-One and Evolver range) and Roger Linn (of the Linn drum machine and Akai MPC range). It's a new analogue/digital drum machine, obviously inspired by the Evolver, but with the 4x4 pads of the MPC range. No details, and a chance the whole thing is a hoax, but it's wonderful to see such a cool boutique thing being talked about all over the forums, with the most sensible analysis at the MPC forums: "Cant they just make it a black case? Whats with the gay 80's rocker pants design?" Quite.
Click here to listen (see below) to a wonderful Radio 4 documentary on Roger Linn, presented by (of all people) Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet. It opens with him playing his mandolin at Caffe Trieste in Berkley, and goes on to a string of great interviews: Brian Eno, Jerry Harrison, Martyn Ware, Pete Rock, Mark Ronson, Dave 'Sequential Circuits' Smith, talking about the connection between drugs, hippies and techonolgy in '70s California + his development of the MPC60 for Akai. If the BBC link has died, you can download the show here. If you work for the BBC and want to complain about the download, email me at the usual address. (Thanks to Jon and Alexis for sending this in)
MT reader Adam lives in California, near Alan Parsons, who engineered 'Dark Side of The Moon' and lots more. Adam kindly picked Alan's brain for me, persuading him to write this list of his all-time favourite gear...
1. Neumann Km84 Microphone - good for anything except vocals.
2. Fairchild 660 Tube Limiter - great for vocals and bass.
3. Drawmer Noise Gate - although modern plugins can do the job
4. Orban or dbx de-esser for problem sibilance on vocals
5. Audio Technica AT 4033 Microphone. I've been using this as a favorite vocal mic. for years
6. Autotune when used tastefully. Most times it is overused
7. The Fairlight and the Linn LM1 Drum Machine changed the world. I worked with both. It's hard to imagine life without Sampling and Drum sequencers
8. A real orchestra with a great arrangement and a competent conductor. It saves hours and usually $$ too
9. Yamaha Motif XS synth. Easy to use and great sounds
10. Any DAW for time shifting tracks in either direction by microseconds or several minutes. This is a newly afforded luxury in the digital age
Up next: Alan's top tips for music making. (Picture via SoS)
On Wednesday (28th June), Peter Gabriel's Real World studios is launching a remix competition, based on the multitrack from 'Shock The Monkey.' Stef from Real World says: "The sample pack is pretty much a who's who of your fave retro synth
and studio tech including Fairlights, Prophet 5's, Linn Drums, Ground
Hum and Headphone Bleed etc..." Shock the Monkey was recorded in 1981-2, and was the first thing Peter made with his new Fairlight CMI: "I'd been dreaming for some time of an instrument that could sample stuff from the real world and then turn it, make it available on a keyboard. Larry Fast told me that he thought he'd heard rumours of such an instrument. It was £10,000 which seemed an unearthly amount of money, got very excited with this thing, it's called the Fairlight. I spent a lot of time then collecting sounds going to factories and the university, getting interesting samples that were then used on that record and the ones after, it was really one of the key things that gave that record a different sound." Here is a QT clip of Peter talking about recording the track.
On wednesday, you can download the samples from Real World Remixed, which is also has multitracks of various world music things. The competition runs until the end of September, and the winner gets a SSL Duende - the £1,000 console-in-a-box which Chris at Analog Industries is lusting after.
PS: Here is the story of how Peter Gabriel spent time at Georgia State Uni trying to teach Bonobo monkeys to play keyboards.
Late as ever, I've just discovered YouTube (basically Flickr for video). Their slogan is 'Broadcast Yourself', but people mainly seem to be broadcasting cool music videos:
1) Prince's new single 'Black Sweat' is fantastic, and very much like the old times again - analog synths, Linn Drums. The video is here, and another great new Hendrix-esque tremolo-tastic song 'Fury' from SNL here.
2) Holy crap! Rick Wakeman playing awful muzak really really fast here
3) Vangelis synthporn, plus comedy piano playing and loads of toffs running about here (stick with it, there's a CS80 and ARP 2500 & 2600s later)
4) Giorgio Moroder and Phil Oakey's finest hour here
5) Clyde Stubblefield drumming with James Brown in 1968 here
6) 808 State's 'Cubik here
7) Some dudes in a bedroom with an 808 and a 303 here
8) Lots of Aphex Twin videos here, particularly this great oldie.
9) And a whole mess of Kraftwerk here
10) Iggy and the Stooges doing 'TV Eye' live in 1970 here
(Thanks to Matrix Synth for pointing me in the right direction)
Analog Industries is leading an exciting revival of the SpecDrum - a £29 hardware sampled drum machine that interfaced with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and used 8 bit (or, according to some reports, 3 bit) samples. I had one at the time, and samefully, I only remember getting bored of it very quickly. Listening to it now, it sounds like a lofi Linn, with a reasonably workable programming system that looks a bit like Fairlight's Page R (complete with 'Peow' sound). Analog Industries have links to Spectrum Emulators, the original files, and various kits, loops and tracks made with the thing. Next up: The Currah µSpeech Spectrum Speech synthesizer, which is also available on emulators.
UPDATE: On a similar, but even cooler note, Matrix Synth has found a Moog Song Producer, which interfaces with a Commodore 64 (That's right, 'Moog' and 'Commodore 64' in the same sentence) on eBay. It's item #8713927196.
My friend Alex just interviewed Ron & Russell Mael from Sparks, and managed to ask them a few questions about Giorgio Moroder: "The drums on their ace Moroder co-written and produced album 'Number One In Heaven' [sample Amazon review quote: "the electronic equivalent of Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell"] were not only all real, but played by Keith Forsey who went on to produce Billy Idol's big hits. ("He had a very steady right foot," said Ron Mael.) They said that Moroder was incredible in that they'd give him 20 songs and he'd reject 19 of them, which they found quite bruising to their egos but at the same time had to admire. They were also there when Moroder had the first ever Linn Drum delivered. They said they stood round going "it'll never replace the feeling of a real live drummer", but apparently Moroder just smiled enigmatically..."
The goldmine of weird vintage drum machines that is eBay Germany continues with This MPC-1 drum machine. It was made in England by MPC Electronics, who also made The Kit, and first shown at MusicMesse in 1983. Inevitably, Depeche Mode used one, and equally enevitably, the company soon went bust. It seems to be an analog, semi-modular drum machine with 8 playable pads. It has no relation to Roger Linn's rather more successful Akai MPC series. More info. This one is currently €249, and my Babelfish translation of the German description suggests that it's pretty much working, but don't bid unless you're sure... More German eBay craziness here and here and here.
Some highlights of the current VEMIA auction of old and geek-friendly instruments, with current prices:
MIMIC Sampler £19: This is an incredibly rare early sampler, made by the people who did the Movement Drum Computer. It doesn't actually work, though. (Top left)
EMT Plate Reverb £680: It's 8 feet long, and it's currently in Belgium. But how cool? (Top right)
Hawkwind's old Synthi £1800: It was once thrown across the stage in a fight, but now it's OK. (Bottom left)
AKG Modular Digital Delay £190: Almost certainly does nothing that your PC can't, but how great would would it look in a rack? (Bottom left).
Other highlights include: Maurice Gibb's Synclavier, an Oberheim 4 Voice, a Linn LM1 (the Prince drum machine), a Fairlight for £1830, and a nice-looking book about EMS Synthis.
Why doesn't music gear look like this anymore? This is a Movement Drum Computer, a very rare British-made machine from the very early 1980s. It used analog and digital modules, so could sound like a Linn or a Simmons. It's most prominent owner was Dave Stewart, who used it on 'Sweet Dreams'. Mick Karn from Japan had one, as did Vince Clarke. It's possible that the Chemical Brothers may have one now (link).
More info: here and here.
I'm usually down on M:Audio for their boring, ugly boxes, but now they've come with a interesting (if slightly ugly) box. The Black Box (great name!) is a neat little guitar amp modeller/effects box/sound card.
The interesting thing is that it includes technology from Roger Linn's everybody-says-it's-brilliant Adrenalinn guitar effects box. $299.95 seems reasonable, considering the Adrenalinn itself is $499.
Dr Bing Klazenby writes with an inspiring idea: "I think Music Thing should consider investigating the importance of rubbish beards in pioneering music technology. I hope this site might be a springboard to such a feature.
"The trio of digital reverb pioneers [Mr Eventide, Mr Lexicon and Mr Ursa Major] looking like crosses between Open University lecturers and Charles Manson is a haunting image, I'm sure you'll agree. And surely those beards must adversely affect the early reflection patterns in these chaps' research studios?"
It's a worrying thought, Bing. Meanwhile, I've noticed that synth pioneers, at least Roger Linn, Dave 'Sequential Circuits' Smith and Bob Moog tend to be clean shaven and balding. What can it all mean?
Over on EM411.com, minisystem wrote a post asking "Is this the world's coolest looking synth?" about Modcan's 'B Series' modular synths (above) from Toronto. He's got a point, but the truth is white synths always look cool:
Access Virus TI Polar Even has white LEDs.
Buchla 200e Buchla synths were always white, to distinguish them from black Moogs.
Arp Odyssey The first batch of Odysseys were white, and supposedly had a better filter than later black ones.
Fairlight CMI All that stuff about sampling distracted people from the crucial element of the Fairlight's success: It was white.
Akai MPC60 Again, people remember that Roger Linn's amazing machine made modern hip-hop possible. But they only bought it because it was white.
Casio VL-Tone All the toy Casio keyboards that followed it were black, but the original VL-Tone was white. That's why they're still cool today.
Farfisa Professional Not a synth, and not strictly white, but this is What Sly Stone Was Playing
EMS Synthi All those English EMS synths were white. Perhaps it helped the spazz-noises to flow out of them?
Oberheim Four Voice Oberheims started out white. When Prince was using a 4-Voice to make 'Purple Rain', they were white. When Eddie Van Halen was using an OB-Xa to make 'Jump', they'd turned black. I think that tells us something important.
*With apologies to Might Magazine and Donnell Alexander
WHITE VS BLACK CONTINUES: FREAKISH ALBINO SYNTHS
Roland have just started shipping the DR-880, a new Dr Rhythm drum machine. It's got some weird features - along with 400+ drum sounds, it has some built in amp models, so you can plug a guitar in and jam along. Best of all, it looks a little bit like a teeny weeny Akai MPC2000 (but without the samples, and the clever Roger Linn design).
But it's a bit hard to see who's going to rush out to spend $500 on a Dr Rhythm drum machine. I seem to remember my friend Laurence's big brother had a DR-110 (right),
which cost £200 when it was released 1984 - by the time we got it it was probably 1987. It was crap, obviously, but there wasn't anything else. Nowadays, the world (well, Ebay) is full of crap drum machines, and a bunch of extra sounds and a weird guitar amp sim isn't going to do the job. Don't miss the virtual DR-110 at the Keyboard Museum. And if you're wondering how much your old Boss kit is worth, this page will tell you.
Possibly inspired by yesterday's eulogies to the Linn LM-1 and the beauty of simple drum programming, Mikey send me a very irritating tip-off about Drum Thing. It's a super simple stand-alone drum machine. It looks great, contains about 10 kits (and a few pianos, which are ideal for Steve Reich fans.) Why irritating? Because it's Mac OSX only. If this thing came in PC VST plug-in flavour, I'd use it every day.
Prince was alone in this room with this microphone when he recorded ‘Kiss’. Fortunately, he told engineer David Z about it, and he told Dan Delaney, who wrote a brilliant Mix magazine article about it:
1) ‘Kiss’ was originally a country song. Prince recorded it on cassette and gave it to a band he was developing. They were called Maserati. The tape was just a verse and chorus with Prince singing and playing acoustic guitar. Maserati weren’t impressed.
2) The band worked on the track for a day, trying to make it work. They still weren’t impressed.
3) Early the next morning, Prince came into the studio and listened to what they’d done. He recorded the electric guitar part and his vocal. Then he threw the band out of the studio and stripped off most of what they’d recorded.
4) Like ‘When Doves Cry’, ‘Kiss’ has no bass line. Instead, the kick drum from a Linn 9000 is put through a backwards reverb patch on an AMS RMX 16, an early digital reverb.
5) There are just nine tracks of music and vocals on the record. It didn’t take long to mix.
6) Prince recorded the vocal in Studio B control room at Paisley Park studios, on a Sennheiser MD441 microphone. Why? Because Stevie Nicks had recommended it to him.
7) The record company were horrified by the track, saying it was too minimal, with no bass and no reverb. Prince was so powerful at the time that he forced Warner Brothers to put the record out, and it went to Number One in the US. That convinced him he was always right, and less than a decade later, he was walking round with ‘Slave’ written on his face.
UPDATE: NOVEMBER 2013: I just received this email from Duane Tudahl:
On Sunday April 28, 1985, Prince was recording the tracks “In All My Dreams” and “Evolsidog” at Sunset Sound in Studio 3, and David Z. and BrownMark were working on songs for Mazarati in Studio 2. “We were in the studios next to each other, checking each other’s progress,’ recalls engineer Susan Rogers. “And at some point they said that they needed a song. Prince stopped what he was doing, I remember this very clearly, he had a little boom box, a little pale green, Sharp one which he had to record ideas on, and he took it and an acoustic guitar to the next room, put it down, put in a blank cassette and he pressed record. On the acoustic guitar he then played "Kiss". It took a few minutes to get the lyrics; he recorded the guitar on one track and the vocals on the other track. He then took out the cassette and said: 'Here, finish this off.'"
“Prince gave us this straight version with just one verse, an acoustic guitar and voice, no rhythm’, explained David Z. ‘It was almost a folk song.”
“Nobody liked the song,’ recalled Mazarati member Tony Christian. ‘It sounded like a country version of something else.’
“I had that song for a long time,’ Prince would later claim. “Changed it around a lot.” The lyrics about confidence and extra time reflected Prince’s affection for Joni Mitchell’s track “Jericho”.
The song was transferred to 24 track and engineer Coke Johnson went to work. “I took that to studio 2’, recalled Johnson. ‘We started fiddling around with it. We used the same changes, but instead of using that acoustic guitar, we ended up gating that guitar and the hi-hat. That is the weird sound you’re hearing. It’s playing the same rhythm the hi-hat’s doing, but it’s doing the changes the acoustic guitar did. That is one of the biggest hooks with it. David thought of the idea, and I hooked up the gate. He was flipping the switch to throw the delay in and out, and actually created that sound for ‘Kiss’.”
Musically, the piano part was lifted from Bo Diddley’s 'Say Man,' and the backup vocals from Brenda Lee's 'Sweet Nothings.' Terry Casey’s vocals were added and most of the band left after 11pm. David Z., BrownMark, Johnson and Tony Christian stayed until the following morning adding depth to the song.
The following morning David Z. wasn’t happy with the results. “We were trying to build a song out of nothing, piece by piece. It was just a collection of ideas built around the idea of a song that wasn't finished yet. We didn't know where it was going. We were getting a little frustrated, and we were exhausted.”
Eventually, the results were revealed. Coke recalled the reaction. “We played it for Prince, who went ballistic, went out to the basketball court playing it loud on the ghetto blaster. He pretty much said: ‘This is too good for Mazarati.’ It pissed us off as we had been up all night working on it.”
Prince took the tape back into Studio 3 and began making his own changes. He quickly eliminated BrownMark’s bass (“It fills up the bottom so much you really don't miss the bass part, especially if you only use it on the first downbeat,” says Z.) and added the James Brown/Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag style electric guitar riff as well as his vocals, which he recorded an octave higher than Terry’s. David Z. asked him what was going on and Prince confirmed his earlier position on the song. “He said to me, ‘this is too good for you guys. I'm taking it back.’”
The track was completed on Monday April 29, 1985.
11 years later, Prince reflected on the song’s origin, but ignored the input from those in the studio. “You go to a higher plane (of creativity) with that. “’Kiss’ doesn’t sound like anything else. They aren’t conscious efforts; you just have to get them out. They’re gifts. Terence Trent D’Arby asked me where “Kiss” came from, and I have no idea. Nothing in it makes sense. Nothing! The hi-hat doesn’t make sense.”
In the end, the basic song was written by Prince, but without David Z., Coke Johnson, and BrownMark, the track probably wouldn’t have gone to #1 on the charts.
It would be the first (and possibly only) Prince track that he shared ‘co-producer’ credit with anyone, which reflects how much he respected the work done without his input.
(Info from early draft of PRINCE: The Studio Sessions by Duane Tudahl)
Here's the one and only prototype of Roger Linn's Midistudio. It was announced at NAMM in 1986 as the replacement for the Linn 9000. That machine had velocity-sensitive pads, but the Midistudio added sampling, and put the pads into the famous 4x4 grid. This machine was the demo model used by the sales team, and it's for sale in the current Vemia auction - currently for £880. Linn went bust in 1986, the Midistudio was never manufactured, and Roger went to design for Akai, releasing the MPC 60 in 1988. It's great watching design evolve. This has the sliders from the Linn 9000, but the colour from the MPC. The cool removable control panel (a 100ft extension cable would have been available) didn't re-surface until the Akai S6000 from 1998, by which time the hardware sampler was all but dead.
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 5 comments Post a Comment 
At the moment it's just a render on a poster on the Dave Smith Instruments stand at NAMM, but this could be the new drum machine from Dave Smith (of Sequential Circuits, man behind the Prophet 5, Pro-One and Evolver range) and Roger Linn (of the Linn drum machine and Akai MPC range). It's a new analogue/digital drum machine, obviously inspired by the Evolver, but with the 4x4 pads of the MPC range. No details, and a chance the whole thing is a hoax, but it's wonderful to see such a cool boutique thing being talked about all over the forums, with the most sensible analysis at the MPC forums: "Cant they just make it a black case? Whats with the gay 80's rocker pants design?" Quite.
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 47 comments Post a Comment 
MT reader Adam lives in California, near Alan Parsons, who engineered 'Dark Side of The Moon' and lots more. Adam kindly picked Alan's brain for me, persuading him to write this list of his all-time favourite gear... 
On Wednesday (28th June), Peter Gabriel's Real World studios is launching a remix competition, based on the multitrack from 'Shock The Monkey.' Stef from Real World says: "The sample pack is pretty much a who's who of your fave retro synth
and studio tech including Fairlights, Prophet 5's, Linn Drums, Ground
Hum and Headphone Bleed etc..." Shock the Monkey was recorded in 1981-2, and was the first thing Peter made with his new Fairlight CMI: "I'd been dreaming for some time of an instrument that could sample stuff from the real world and then turn it, make it available on a keyboard. Larry Fast told me that he thought he'd heard rumours of such an instrument. It was £10,000 which seemed an unearthly amount of money, got very excited with this thing, it's called the Fairlight. I spent a lot of time then collecting sounds going to factories and the university, getting interesting samples that were then used on that record and the ones after, it was really one of the key things that gave that record a different sound." Here is a QT clip of Peter talking about recording the track. 
Late as ever, I've just discovered YouTube (basically Flickr for video). Their slogan is 'Broadcast Yourself', but people mainly seem to be broadcasting cool music videos: 
Analog Industries is leading an exciting revival of the SpecDrum - a £29 hardware sampled drum machine that interfaced with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and used 8 bit (or, according to some reports, 3 bit) samples. I had one at the time, and samefully, I only remember getting bored of it very quickly. Listening to it now, it sounds like a lofi Linn, with a reasonably workable programming system that looks a bit like Fairlight's Page R (complete with 'Peow' sound). Analog Industries have links to Spectrum Emulators, the original files, and various kits, loops and tracks made with the thing. Next up: The Currah µSpeech Spectrum Speech synthesizer, which is also available on emulators.
1: A very cute turquoise-coloured valve amp
