Roger Linn shared some renderings over the weekend of the LinnDrum II – the much-hyped new drum machine from Linn and synth guru Dave Smith.
Here’s what Linn & Smith have to say about the LinnDrum II status:
I’m sorry to report that we won’t be shipping in 2008 and I can’t yet offer a new estimated ship date. The good news is that it’s turned into a significantly more powerful and creative product.
The bad news is that we’d prefer not to release details of the new design because it’s so cool that I don’t want to show our cards to the competition. However, I do want to thank all those who wrote in with suggestions because this interactive design process has very much helped to change what we thought the product originally should be into what we now know you really want.
For those of you who are new to LinnDrum II, its new subtitle is “Beat-Centric Digital Audio Workstation with Integrated Analog Synthesis”. Inspired by how the MPC product line that I (Roger) originally created for Akai has evolved a new genre of musical instrument, LinnDrum II aspires to raise the bar beyond the current crop of high-end pad-oriented music production station products in order to enable musicians around the world to better realize the next wave of beat-oriented music.
By now, you’re probably drooling uncontrollably, so here are a few more gear porn shots of LinnDrum II designs that got dumped:
LinnDrum II, 2nd Design
LinnDrum II, 1st Design – aka BoomChik
Hmm, interesting. Looking at the droppe ddesigns, they went form an MPC like layout to something a bit retro or throwback in design and layout, esp. with the large back-part to it as opposed to the controls taking the entire surface area.
So, can someone tell me why this will “enable musicians around the world to better realize the next wave of beat-oriented music” as compared to the MPC or some other such vst?
That thing is hooorrrrrny!!
can’t wait
BlueBrat – the built in synth section is probably the key to the next wave of beat-oriented music.
WOW! So no release in 2008? Will there at least be a prototype teaser
at NAMM 2009? You KNOW I’m a’comin’ to your booth Dave!
They’ve done a great job of hyping this by trickling out renders of stuff you can’t have. I hope they can deliver something better. The BoomChik still looks the best to me, though!
Ok, I’ll wait! No build-in-pc-2-boot for minutes and may be PAD-per-Step in a line? Isn’t it better to have 16 raws of (pads with leds fader knob encoder)?
Maaaaan! Dave, you’re killing me! We all know that an extra-long developement design time is usually a bad omen- sure enough, I just found out that there won’t be a teaser proto at NAMM!
Shame on you, you should have kept this thing under wraps before releasing pics and info……
I’ll be at NAMM, you’ll see me lurking in the Moog and Korg booths….
WON’T be playing with the LInn, however 🙁