The 80’s became a decade widely revisited by artists and procures nowadays such as The Weeknd, Dua Lipa and many others, mainly due to its characteristic sounds, hardware, great innovations in technology in terms of music production and instruments, becoming the birth of the digital era in music production.
Digital reverbs, modulation effect racks, and perhaps the most emblematic sound of the 80’s: the drum machines.
Electronic devices created to emulate and sequence various tones of drums and widely used in the 80’s, the drum machines became the symbol of the 80’s music.
Between these drum machines used by almost every pop artist of that decade, one became the classic and definitive example of this piece of hardware: The LinnDrum.
The Linn LM-1 Drum Computer was manufactured by Linn Electronics and released in 1980. It was the first drum machine to use samples of acoustic drums, and one of the first programmable drum machines. Its designer, the American engineer Roger Linn, wanted a machine that would produce more realistic drum sounds and offer more than preset patterns.
The LM-1 featured twelve 8-bit percussion samples, which could be individually tuned: kick, snare, hi-hat, cabasa, tambourine, two toms, two congas, cowbell, claves, and hand claps. Cymbal sounds were not included, due to the cost of long sound samples at the time. Each sound could be tuned and has its own output to allow processing by external hardware. The LM-1 also introduced features such as "timing correct" (quantization) and "shuffle" (swing), and the ability to chain patterns.
The LinnDrum, also referred to as the LM-2, released between 1982 and 1985. About 5,000 units were sold.
It was cheaper and more widely produced than his first drum machine, sold far more units than the Linn LM-1.
The LinnDrum is a hardware widely sought after and still the most authentic way of reaching
the characteristic drum sound of the 80’s.
You can watch a demo video of the LinnDrum in the video down below:
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