By drumat!c
Thu Jul 28, 2005 4:29 am
Going Beyond the Beat Box
As told by Mark Vail:
In this day of 16-bit arrogance, mention the word "great" in reference to an 8-bit device and you're bound to raise a few cynical eyebrows. But if it weren't for an 8-bit marvel known as the Linn LM-1 =- with which Roger Linn introduced a number of drum machine features taken for granted today =- it might have taken us a lot longer to reach this enlightened age of the digital drum machine.
Before the LM-1, 99% of a drum machines were essentially organ add-ons that exclusively featured preset rhythm patterns. The final 1% comprised John Simonton's programmable drum machine (*distributed by Paia), the Roland CR-78 programmable drum box, and a 6'x2' beast that Bob Moog built in the late '60s but never put into production. Not only that, but they all made sounds using analog synthesis, just like the Proophet-5, ARP Quadra, and Oberheim OB-X =- popular polyphonic synths of the day (c. 1980). If you haven't tried it, fabricating realistic drum sounds with analog circuits is about as satisfying as eating roast beef with a teaspoon. Roger Linn changed all that by introducing the LM-1.
"I was a starving musician," Roger remembers. "I had a little four-track recorder and some music gear in one room of my house where I was making demos. Of course, the hardest thing to record is drums in your home studio. I remember looking at drum machines, but they were too expensive. They cost something like $500.00"
Furthermore, as Roger said back in early '88, "I wanted a drum machine that did more than play preset samba patterns and didn't sound like crickets."
So what did he do? He went out and made his own drum machine, one with a price tag of $5000.00. But it wasn't that simple or quick, and many a notable musician didn't sneeze at the price because, unlike those $500.00 drum machines, the LM-1 played samples of real drums =- a radical departure for that time.
But how did Roger jump from being a "starving musician" to the manufacturer of a digital drum machine? "I had an interest in computers, and a little s-100 buss system. I had taken a couple of classes on how to write computer programs in BASIC and assembly code, and I had fooled around with hardware a little bit. I sent away to Roland for a voice generator from one of their existing analog-synthesis drum machines, hooked it up to my computer, and wrote a program that displayed a grid on the computer screen showing time versus drum events. You'd plug little stars into positions on the grid, hit the space bar, and it would play the pattern. It eventually evolved to include chaining of patterns into a song. A lot of the ideas that I came up with at the time =- like quantizing or shuffle play =- were really accidents of programming that eventually turned into LM-1 features."
==to be continued tomorrow night......
DRUMAT!C
As told by Mark Vail:
In this day of 16-bit arrogance, mention the word "great" in reference to an 8-bit device and you're bound to raise a few cynical eyebrows. But if it weren't for an 8-bit marvel known as the Linn LM-1 =- with which Roger Linn introduced a number of drum machine features taken for granted today =- it might have taken us a lot longer to reach this enlightened age of the digital drum machine.
Before the LM-1, 99% of a drum machines were essentially organ add-ons that exclusively featured preset rhythm patterns. The final 1% comprised John Simonton's programmable drum machine (*distributed by Paia), the Roland CR-78 programmable drum box, and a 6'x2' beast that Bob Moog built in the late '60s but never put into production. Not only that, but they all made sounds using analog synthesis, just like the Proophet-5, ARP Quadra, and Oberheim OB-X =- popular polyphonic synths of the day (c. 1980). If you haven't tried it, fabricating realistic drum sounds with analog circuits is about as satisfying as eating roast beef with a teaspoon. Roger Linn changed all that by introducing the LM-1.
"I was a starving musician," Roger remembers. "I had a little four-track recorder and some music gear in one room of my house where I was making demos. Of course, the hardest thing to record is drums in your home studio. I remember looking at drum machines, but they were too expensive. They cost something like $500.00"
Furthermore, as Roger said back in early '88, "I wanted a drum machine that did more than play preset samba patterns and didn't sound like crickets."
So what did he do? He went out and made his own drum machine, one with a price tag of $5000.00. But it wasn't that simple or quick, and many a notable musician didn't sneeze at the price because, unlike those $500.00 drum machines, the LM-1 played samples of real drums =- a radical departure for that time.
But how did Roger jump from being a "starving musician" to the manufacturer of a digital drum machine? "I had an interest in computers, and a little s-100 buss system. I had taken a couple of classes on how to write computer programs in BASIC and assembly code, and I had fooled around with hardware a little bit. I sent away to Roland for a voice generator from one of their existing analog-synthesis drum machines, hooked it up to my computer, and wrote a program that displayed a grid on the computer screen showing time versus drum events. You'd plug little stars into positions on the grid, hit the space bar, and it would play the pattern. It eventually evolved to include chaining of patterns into a song. A lot of the ideas that I came up with at the time =- like quantizing or shuffle play =- were really accidents of programming that eventually turned into LM-1 features."
==to be continued tomorrow night......
DRUMAT!C
Huh?
