SKFNOTE: Forty-two years up the road it is perhaps hard for a large segment of the drumming world to truly understand the initial 1980s impact of the LinnDrum on that world. Suddenly one compact machine could keep perfect metronomic time, it didn’t drink, it didn’t arrive to gigs late, it didn’t smoke, and it produced remarkably good drum sounds.

Max Weinberg, in my company, once put forward the idea that, in the future, kids who wanted to play drums would choose the LinnDrum over acoustic drums. “Why go through all the work of learning how to play a double-stroke roll when you can get that sound with the push of a button?” asked Max.

A scary thought. But plausible.

This 1982 Bill Bruford interview excerpt is from a longer interview edited and published as a Modern Drummer feature interview. This was very soon after King Crimson released its “Beat” album.

This is Bruford speculating on why the LinnDrum appeared, and then he shares some of the ways in which he found creative ways to use the drum machine in the studio and onstage with King Crimson.