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

During one conversation, Max Weinberg told me he could imagine a future where 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, plausible thought.

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

This is Bruford speculating on why the LinnDrum was invented. And Bruford shares some ways in which he found creative uses in the studio and onstage for the LinnDrum.