Roger’s insight into sequencing, swing and timing helps shed light on some of the most commonly debated intricacies of electronic music production. Only one person could give us definitive answers to all our queries: the inventor of swing, quantisation, the LinnDrum, the MPC and the DSI Tempest. Over a series of emails with Roger we discussed sequencer swing and drum machine timing, starting with the question of the MPC’s magical groove and moving on to the importance of tight timing and whether it’s better to play beats in real time than to program them with quantisation. But can it really be that hardware sold a quarter of a century ago is somehow better than the latest DAWs and drum software?Įventually it struck us that there was only one person who’d be able to give us definitive answers to all our queries: Roger Linn, inventor of swing and quantisation, designer of the ground-breaking Linn sample-based drum machines, the Akai MPC60 and MPC3000 and the DSI Tempest. The idea of ‘MPC swing’ is so ingrained in electronic music folklore that it’s considered almost heretical to question it – especially among large chunks of the hip hop production community. Perhaps above all else, one of the main questions we found ourselves asking was why the earlier models in Akai’s MPC series of sampling workstations are still considered to be among the best around when it comes to groove and timing. Do dedicated hardware drum machines and samplers offer better timing and swing than software-based alternatives? Does swing do exactly the same thing in all DAWs and sequencers? What else contributes to the groove of a beat or loop? While researching our recent Passing Notes feature on DAW and drum machine swing, we found ourselves returning to the same few questions over and over again. We talk to drum machine pioneer Roger Linn to discover the secrets of perfect musical timing and find out why the swing of his MPC sampler series remains so highly rated. How important are a few milliseconds? When it comes to sequencers, they can mean the difference between a perfect groove and a sloppy mess.
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February 2023
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