Roger Linn Design

puremusic · Post by **puremusic** » Wed Jul 14, 2021 4:43 am

If I want the sound of the original LinnDrum for some 80's style music where can I find that today?

I doubt I can afford a used original I'm afraid!

Rivanni · Post by **Rivanni** » Wed Jul 14, 2021 5:18 am

There are many Linndrum sample packs available.

puremusic · Post by **puremusic** » Wed Jul 14, 2021 5:29 am

Are they legitimate? If I recall correctly the Linndrum was sample based itself yes? Normally I believe you can sample analog instruments but sampling directly a sampled instrument is a copyright issue, though I'm not sure about that if you go far back in time enough.

hariossa · Post by **hariossa** » Sat Jul 17, 2021 7:00 pm

Well, there are a lot of LinnDrum sounds in the web, some free, some cheap, some not so cheap. I think it may be a copyright problem there but it is so widespread that it is impossible to fight it.

Tj Shredder · Post by **Tj Shredder** » Sun Jul 18, 2021 11:47 am

I guess Roger could give a license for the sounds to all LinnStrument or any Roger Linn hardware owners here by word of mouth, I guess there are also legitimate sample packs around. Don’t know about these:
https://blog.wavosaur.com/3-free-linndr ... i-plugins/
Or this sample pack for a LM-2
https://reverb.com/software/samples-and ... ample-pack

Roger_Linn · Post by **Roger_Linn** » Thu Aug 12, 2021 10:20 pm

I really don't mind that there are lots of LinnDrum samples on the web, and take it as a kind compliment. First, I think that those old 8-bit, 27 kHz encoding sounds are pretty bad, and the perceived value is entirely due to the talented individuals like Prince who used them so creatively. But also, the kick, toms and congas all used sweeping lowpass filters to remove the horrible 8-bit quantization noise, so sampling the actual analog output of an LM-1 or LinnDrum is a better reproduction of the actual sound that copying the digital data in the original chips.

hariossa · Post by **hariossa** » Sat Aug 14, 2021 4:19 pm

What kind of filter did you use for that? I'm guessing a very low Q and maybe 12 db lowpass?

Roger_Linn · Post by **Roger_Linn** » Sat Aug 14, 2021 4:43 pm

As I recall, it was a Curtis chip so 24 dB/oct and set to zero Q.

hariossa · Post by **hariossa** » Sat Aug 14, 2021 6:05 pm

Thanks Roger, it will be fun to try to emulate the sound in Bitwig's Grid.

hariossa · Post by **hariossa** » Sun Aug 15, 2021 11:45 am

I've been tinkering with some some bass drum samples in Bitwig with mixed results, the kind of bass drum sampled plays a big role in the ending sound, I'm wondering if you used some eq in the samples burnt in the EPROMS in order to keep some of the high end, like a high shelf boosting from 1kHz or something.
Also I'm going to try to convert the samples to 8 bit 27kHz, right now I'm using the 8-Bit processor from Bitwig and I suspect that it exaggerates the lo-fi effect a bit too much.

Roger_Linn · Post by **Roger_Linn** » Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:38 pm

Hi hariossa,

That was a long time ago and I don't remember, but I'm sure I used some EQ because that low bit width and low sampling frequency sounded horrible. By the way, the samples weren't 8 bit linear but rather 8 bit companding, an encoding method developed by Bell Telephone years ago to increase the poor dynamic range of 8 bits for early digital phone calls. It concentrated the 256 steps more densely around the zero crossing, thereby spreading out the noise and distortion more evenly through the dynamic range.

But why spend such effort merely to reproduce such horrible sounds? I don't think those sounds are inherently good, but rather we like them because they were used on good recordings. I appreciate the pleasant association, but wouldn't it be easier to just play a sample taken from the output of the machine?

hariossa · Post by **hariossa** » Tue Aug 17, 2021 8:30 am

Hi Roger, I understand what you’re saying, the thing for me is the fun of trying to reproduce the process and by doing that also learn more about audio and music. I’m not trying to get exactly the same sounds from the original machine, in fact I have bought some samples of drum machines from UVI and Samples From Mars which includes the Linndrum, so aside from the learning goal I want to create some drum sounds that are totally different but at the same time have that “old drum machine” nastiness in them

I think it is a characteristic sound that, as you pointed out, belongs to recordings that we love.
I get that for you those sounds are not what your goal was but only what the technical limitations of the time allowed you to have, which must have been frustrating to some degree for you. I guess Leo Fender never thought overdriven sounds were desirable when he designed his first amplifiers but here we are decades later with a whole giant market based on overdrive and distortion.
As Chick Corea once said “there is no bad sound, just the wrong sound for the song”.

Roger_Linn · Post by **Roger_Linn** » Tue Aug 17, 2021 3:21 pm

I understand. There’s a lot of folklore surrounding old music products. Lucky for me, I guess.

Roger Linn Design

KVR Audio

LinnDrum today?