Esteemed electronic instrument designer Roger Linn has uploaded a new video onto Youtube that sees him demonstrate how the Akai MPC Live can be used as ‘the ultimate looper’.
It’s quite a turn of events for Linn, one of those select individuals whose name is synonymous with an instrument, in his case the Linn Drum, the sound of late '80s pop.
Linn worked with Akai in the late '80s to create the original MPC60. Akai was then bought out by Jack O’Donnell, the American company Numark, with whom Linn has a notorious falling out in the late 1990s.
Jack O’Donnell's company – later rebranded as InMusic – stopped paying royalties to Linn and let the MPC line decline. Linn became a prominent critic of the company, to the extent of calling O’Donnell, “a bastard”.
But times change, people move on and Akai and Linn now appear to have mended their broken relationship – hence the video which sees him extolling and then demonstrating the looping capabilities of the Akai MPC Live 2. “Kudos to Akai’s software team,” he says.
The video also see Linn making use of his own Linnstrument hardware, an expressive keyboard-like control surface first released in 2015.
It’s not the first such video Linn has made since he and Akai made up. Last year he surprised many by reviewing the MPC Live 2 after the current Akai company sent him a model.
Linn himself isn't alone in being impressed by the current generation of MPC hardware. When we reviewed the MPC Live 2 in 2021 we called it "the high point of the current MPC range."
