#instrumentiness

[twinklr-notebook]

Roger Linn On Swing, Groove & The Magic Of The MPC's Timing - Attack Magazine

How important are a few milliseconds? When it comes to sequencers, they can mean the difference between a perfect groove and a sloppy mess. We talk to drum machine pioneer Roger Linn to discover the secrets of perfect musical timing and find out why the…

“There are a few factors that have contributed to natural, human-feeling grooves in my drum machines. In order of importance.:..”

And then, Roger Linn goes on to describe what he thinks the core instrumentiness of a Linn drum machine - be it a Linndrum, a MPC, or a Tempest - are. I really like how clear and plainspoken this is, and entirely in service of the performer or musician, rather than of a specific ideal.

Also: fascinating to see a train of thought carried on for so long.

[twinklr-notebook]

“...there’s something to a real music instrument. It’s not a piece of software, it’s not something where you - well, perfect example - you have a little keyboard with a row of unlabelled knobs. Well, what do those knobs do? Well, that depends on what software you have in, so it has this plugged in, it might do one thing, it’s this it’s something else. And that software might stop working in five years if you don’t update it every year. It’s just not a musical instrument. Something like this [the Prophet 6] if you grab this knob, it’ll do the same thing today, tomorrow, thirty years for now. It’s actually kinda nice - I could say you could keep this for 30 years. Because people have Prophet-5s from 35 years ago and are still using them (and in fact they cost more now than they did when we sold them).” - 1:30ish in An Evening With Dave Smith Part I

I liked this nugget on instrumentiness from this long, informal chat with Dave Smith (of Sequential Circuits/DSI fame). I think instruments can be made out of software, for sure, but the value to the same thing does the same thing is high.