Alexander Aciman | Vox

Meet the unassuming drum machine that changed music forever

2018-04-16T08:06:08-04:00

Kanye West performs with an MPC. | Kevin Winter/Getty Images for iHeartMedia

In a set from 2013, a masked Kanye West appears onstage and stands before a veiled podium. With a slow, theatrical tug, he pulls away the veil to reveal an AKAI Music Production Center, or MPC — a small, unassuming drum machine barely bigger than an Etch-a-Sketch. He presses a single button, triggering the lone opening piano note to “Runaway.” Several years later, a diligent ear could listen to Frank Ocean’s Blonde and hear his producer, Om’Mas Keith, tapping out a beat on the same electric drum machine.

Skilled as these two are on their MPCs, this device isn’t a Keith or Kanye house specialty; it’s been at the heart of some of the most seminal musical works since its introduction by AKAI in 1988 and is still widely used today. It created a generation of hybrid producer-musicians, like West, J Dilla — whose MPC is in the Smithsonian — and Dr. Dre, who kept several in his studio at all times.

The MPC appeared everywhere. Outkast’s Big Boi engineered many of the group’s iconic beats on the MPC. Mark Ronson is so attached to his MPC that it got a custom paint job, and many of Kanye West’s most famous songs, and much of his breakout album College Dropout, have sprung from the MPC.

So how did this small, portable electric box, which looks more like a Super Nintendo than a musical instrument, became the tool of the trade for pop, hip-hop, and electronic musicians and producers? By condensing all elements of studio production into a desktop instrument that was more playable, more intuitive, and unlike anything ever put before the musical world.

The MPC made music production intuitive in a way it had never been before

In the late 1980s, producers and musicians began turning more and more to drum machines in order to create beats and loops without using a full band. More importantly, however, these machines served the needs of a changing musical style where the beats themselves — no longer the thankless work of a drummer sitting at the back of a stage — would begin to work more intimately alongside the vocals, and even shine on their own.

At the same time, hip-hop musicians also began making wider use of sampler machines, which allowed them to take pieces of music from an external source and incorporate it into their own tracks. Machines that combined these two functions (often called grooveboxes) were often difficult to use and required a more nuanced technical knowledge in music production.

These expensive machines, such as the popular ones from E-mu Systems, which in the mid-’80s could cost as much as $15,000, were among a young producer’s only options — until Roger Linn, the designer of the original MPC, created the MPC60.

Retailing around $5,000, the MPC60 was a drum machine and sampler that also integrated editing functions. Gone were the switches and small, hard industry-standard buttons of 1980s grooveboxes and studio mixing boards. Instead, the MPC featured 16 large rubber pads that could be pressed and hit to make musical sounds, as though the machine itself were an instrument with keys. It could be used to compose full tracks. It came with floppy disks preloaded with a variety of sounds and instruments; and unlike many other available products, the pads were pressure-sensitive and could produce different sounds based on how hard they were pressed.

All of this offered near-orchestral versatility and total creative control to its user. But most importantly, it wasn’t an enormous, stationary mixing panel with as many buttons as an airplane cockpit. The MPC didn’t need a studio to be operated, but instead could be plugged into a sound system in a basement. Its only real match was the E-mu SP1200, which had neither the pads nor the approachability of the MPC.

The MPC’s appearance is so straightforward that it feels almost like a trap. Roughly the dimensions of two MacBooks stacked atop each other, the MPC has a cream white/off-gray body and, in addition to its 16 pads, a small LCD screen to make editing a lot easier, another innovation introduced with the MPC. The body includes two knobs for fine-tuning samples or selecting functions, and red “record” and “over dub” buttons for saving or looping beats. Its dozen or so other buttons control functions that don’t feel markedly different from those of a VHS machine or other technology of the day. And finally, in the top right corner is a convenient “Help” button, should the user find that this newfangled technology was all too much for them.

To show just how easy it is to use, Kanye once appeared on 60 Minutes and demonstrated to Bob Simon, his interviewer, how the MPC allows you to go “from this simple kick drum all the way to what you hear on the radio.” (He also explains to Simon what a “dope-ass beat” is.) West goes on to produce a beat in a matter of seconds. “I don’t think anyone would believe you’re doing that all from this one rhythm machine,” says Simon.

Linn’s invention could be played straight out of the box by working musical professionals. What these professionals would need, he figured, was not a convoluted panel but something intuitive and easy to use that offered real-time editing, essentially eliminating the step-by-step process that makes music production so time-consuming.

“I dislike reading manuals,” Linn told me in an email, “and I dislike having my creative process interrupted by an unintuitive operating system or reading a manual written by an engineer. With the MPC60 and MPC3000, you could take them out of the box, plug in a disk and turn them on, then immediately hear a variety of good beats with good human feel.”

The pads and the layout of the MPC made it easier for someone like Om’Mas Keith, only 16 years old when he first got his hands on an MPC, to feel at ease behind it almost immediately.

“It’s the friendliest interface,” says Coby Ashpis, a musician and producer in Los Angeles. “You have those 16 big, cushy pads. The simplicity allows you to focus on the music itself.”

In the 30 years since the MPC’s release, these big, cushy pads have been adopted by countless imitators and have even appeared on the machines of competitors whose rigidly functional earlier models were precisely what the MPC originally sought to replace. They are now standard issue for DJ technology.

“The 4×4 drum grid exists across all instruments, everyone making controllers uses it. The interface is timeless,” Ashpis says.

Also part of this timeless charm — what drew people like Dr. Dre to the MPC and what keeps them coming back today — is that many believe its stock sounds have more character and more presence straight out of the box than other machines or digital software.

The MPC also made it possible for users to chop and tweak their samples in new ways. Keith recalls plugging in his turntable, zoning on in a single drumbeat from a track on a record, and assigning that single sampled drumbeat to one of the 16 pads. That way, he could use this sampled drum note while composing his own beats instead of relying on the MPC’s stock drum sounds.

“The ability to chop so finely lets you take very minute samples,” Ashpis explains. “Then you have this whole toolbox of sounds decontextualized from their original source and you can get creative and do something new.”

While once musicians were sampling wholesale, sampling itself became something of a new art form.

The MPC’s one-stop functionality means music can begin and end on the same machine

The combination of functions and simple workflow helped musicians pioneer entirely new styles of music.

“You can play one sample like a full instrument; you can change it. It opened up all recorded music to be played with in a really freeing way — a way that still used beats and samples but is more similar to playing a traditional acoustic instrument like keyboards or drums,” says Ashpis.

Prince Charles Alexander, a producer and professor of music production and engineering/commercial record production at Berklee College of Music, explains that the MPC also offered orchestral resources to lone-wolf producers. “A drum machine only has built-in drum sounds,” he says. “But now with the MPC you could make your rhythm come not just from drums but from horn hits, synth screeches. Now you were working percussively and with a far wider tambour of instrumentation.”

The MPC’s editing function made it a one-stop device where music could begin and end on the MPC alone. Making music had never been easier. “With the MPC, you could do everything in one house,” Alexander says.

Keith used the MPC for nearly everything: “I was doing beats; I would sample hooks and fly them in and create songs. All we needed to do was take the MPC and the synth beat, and cut the lead vocal.”

The overall effect was also democratizing. “It was the first real reduction in price point in a device that gave people the ability to make records without the need of a huge studio,” Keith says.

Not only was 1993’s wildly popular MPC3000 cheaper than other samplers, and orders of magnitude cheaper than six-figure studio soundboards, but it helped push forward budding musical minds that didn’t necessarily have the means to study it in school, and offered working musicians the ability to use refined technical tools without requiring years of studio experience or access to the latest studio technology.

“The MPC was less intimidating to people that wanted to make music because it didn’t have things like piano keys,” says Alexander “But the data behind those pads, it was the same thing as hitting a piano key. If you never studied music, you’d look at a piano and think, ‘Now I need to learn music.’ Looking at the MPC, all you see is a bunch of gray pads.”

This is not to say that the MPC can turn any patient user into a virtuoso, or that it is necessarily exceedingly easy to use. The constraints of the MPC — such as a limited memory bank and a time limit for samples on early models — required great parsimony and creativity to work around. Keith, for example, instead of loading a note directly from his turntable into the MPC, learned that he could play records at higher speeds when loading them into the MPC and then slow them down back down to their original speed as digital files on the MPC, allowing him to take longer samples than the device was theoretically capable of doing.

Once these skills were mastered, users found that the MPC made production easier and more efficient. Offering real-time recording and editing with a high sound quality effectively allows the user to produce music live, as it’s being created. The MPC simplified or eliminated a lot of the busywork and time-consuming tasks associated with the music production, leaving musicians ample time to create and focus on their work instead of sweating over a massive soundboard to achieve the same result. “With the MPC, there’s nothing else you need to do but get to work,” Keith says.

Moreover, this ability to produce live gave made it easier to use the MPC performatively, such as in the case of West or Lady Gaga, who played an MPC upright on stage as if it were an acoustic instrument.

The MPC helped change the notion of what a musician is

There are so few pieces of technology that exist and continue to be used almost in the exact same way and for the exact same reason 30 years after its introduction. In the late 1980s, Apple was releasing its large beige cube desktop computers, which today seem so primitive as to be almost entirely unusable; even using desktop computers from just seven years ago can feel like an exercise in frustration. And yet Linn’s original MPCs continue to fetch a premium secondhand, not for nostalgia but for their actual functions.

The MPC occupies this rarest space in the world of technology: Its legacy and its effect exist alongside its significance today. It is a historical piece of musical technology that fundamentally changed music but has not outlived its functions. Nobody would balk at seeing one in a studio in 2018.

“Producers over 35 all probably made heavy use of the MPC,” Alexander explains. “I would be shocked if people like Bruno Mars and Pharrell didn’t have one somewhere in the chain.” Even the software that the younger producers are using (which have given the Macbook a similarly iconic stage presence) still emulates the MPC, and has essentially transposed the tools of the MPC box itself into a program.

And yet for many, this type of computer-based software isn’t necessarily any easier to use than the original interface of the MPC. In fact, it was in reaction to tedious mechanization that Linn developed the MPC to begin with: “It dumbfounds me how many computer software applications force the musician to learn engineering in order to play music,” he told me in an email. “In my view, the purpose of the designer is to understand the engineering but to design a musical instrument.”

There is so much the world of music simply wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the MPC. This is perhaps because Linn was able to see exactly how the world of music was changing, and that it would continue to rely more and more on digital tools. He built a box that allowed the musician and the producer to lean into the future of music without ever being alienated from their craft and needing to become engineers. As Keith puts it: “Roger Linn had his finger on the pulse of where we were headed.”

And as musicians themselves began making beats and choosing samples, the MPC helped dissolve the stubborn delineations that once existed between the two sides of the studio window. The producer and the musician now had the ability to become one. “Any human being who uses that machine is a musician, is a drummer, a beatmaker,” Keith says. Like J Dilla or Kanye West or Mark Ronson, you could have two equally influential careers as a musician and as a producer.

This freedom to create while working in conjunction with the technical demands of modern music brought forth a new kind of virtuoso — part performer, part producer, part beatmaker, part orchestra conductor, who had a sense for rhythm and percussion, who knew which samples would bring a track to life, who could chop and shrink and stretch as needed. Who could eventually, like Keith, learn to play the MPC with their eyes closed.

The explosion of electronic music and hip-hop could not have happened without a machine as intimately connected to the creative process as the MPC. It challenged the notion of what a band can look like, or what it takes to be a successful musician. No longer does one need five capable musicians and instruments. And the fact that an MPC can sample music, chop it up, change the pitch, slow it down, and put it on loop, allowed lone musicians and producers to put together symphonic, experimental music relying only on the box, a few buttons, and 16 gray pads. No manual required.

How a lifetime of running changes you

2017-12-14T11:42:32-05:00

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I started running only a few weeks after my 12th birthday. My best friend and I had impulsively decided to join the middle school cross-country team to get out of gym class.

I didn’t even know what cross-country was at the time — before the first day of practice I suspected it would involve some form of skiing equipment. Being the two youngest and slowest runners on the team, my friend and I started training after school by running with rocks in our backpacks. As far as I knew, we were merely holding out until the other was ready to call it quits.

I do not know how those painful and dangerous mid-October afternoon training sessions somehow became the start of my longest, most dedicated relationship with any activity. But 14 years later, I still get single-word texts from the former teammates I trained with on that grassy, mile-and-a-half-long pitch in the Bronx: Run? That’s all I need to read and I’m already reaching for my shoes.

The first question people ask after learning that I run is whether I am training for a marathon. I’m not. Nor am I training for a half-marathon, although on occasion my former teammates and I do go out and run 13 miles. I am not running to stay in shape, but I do wonder what might happen if I decided to stop.

For many, the act of running is a way to stay thin, or to fight off heart disease or stay active in a strange attempt at getting over a breakup, or even to catch a train whose doors are about to close. But I don’t run to be alone and escape into my headphones, or to zone out and meditate on my troubles. I am not an introvert who uses exercise as a break from human contact.

For me, running is itself the destination. It has become my way of balancing the scales, and at some point since 2002 I started to feel most at home when my body was most worn out. I count my life in miles.

I run because after all these years I have learned to find a measure of serenity in the act of running. Somewhere in the past decade I started to find pleasure in this singularly painful activity.

In the past few years, long-distance running has gone from a trademark of masochists and compulsive dieters to a national pastime for people in their 20s and 30s. Runner’s World estimates that the number of people who complete half-marathon races has increased almost tenfold, from 300,000 to more than 2 million since 1990 when I was born.

According to Running USA’s state of the sport report, the number of marathon finishers has seen a growth of nearly 50 percent in the past 10 years. Distance running has even become something of a casual hobby, with a slew of apps and online resources dedicated to getting people in marathon shape in only a few months.

While new runners may be familiar with the pleasure of leaving their house on the first day of spring with nothing but shoes and shorts and a key, they cannot possibly be aware of the ways in which running will change their lives. When practiced over great periods of time — not simply over many miles — I have found that something about the sport changes you, perhaps even the way some experts believe that growing up bilingual alters brain function.

I am only now beginning to understand the long-term effects that running has had on my life. Running long distance means that some ligament or muscle of the body will always be sore, even when not running, and so runners learn to interpret all manner of pain in only two volumes: chronic or fleeting. Anything less than chronic can be pushed through, fought with, massaged, foam-rolled out of the body, or very simply ignored. This is because to become a better runner, one must repeatedly push oneself beyond one’s threshold. Can we really be surprised that this instinct spills into other corners of our lives?

This past fall I waited three days after a rock collapsed out from under me on a hike before going to see a doctor, only to learn that I had broken two ribs. Last year a friend and longtime distance runner waited so long to see a dentist about tooth pain that the nerve in her tooth died. Dr. Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine specialist and author of Running Strong, believes that runners condition themselves to ignore pain.

“There are some things about running that change physiology and psychology,” he says. “Runners can tough stuff out. Their pain response is a little dulled over time. They can suppress things, push out longer, because they’re used to it.”

For years I assumed that some of my most pronounced quirks were personal idiosyncrasies — leaving the house without a coat in single-degree temperatures, forgoing the use of oven mitts unless a pan is hot enough to burn skin, trudging almost unaware through bouts of fever or bronchitis — only to realize that these very same behaviors were practiced by many of the long-distance runners I know. It is not that we cannot feel pain, but we simply choose not to care.

Yet at the same time, a stiff hamstring can derail almost anything. These sorts of workout-interrupting discomforts are treated with the same urgency as grave illnesses, and must be addressed immediately. Runners can ignore almost any pains save those that — however faint or indistinct — presage a break or a tear.

It is fitting that this acquired pain threshold is accompanied by a greater psychological endurance as well. Runners will frequently train in negative splits — a term used to describe the practice of running each mile at a faster pace than the last. This sort of repeated aggression against one’s physical limits can only happen when one has the endurance for it.

This means that because runners are able to sustain an activity over the course of 9 miles, they also find themselves particularly well-adapted to working intensely for long stretches of time.

“Psychologically, it’s the same kind of thing as changing your pain response,” Metzl says. “It’s socialization. You train yourself to develop this form of concentration, which is necessary for long-distance running.”

For years I avoided learning to drive. Yet after finally getting my license at 25, I was surprised to find myself well-suited to very long bouts behind the wheel, able to drive for many hours before beginning to fade.

But this socialization, as Metzl calls it, can come with obvious drawbacks. Shorter tasks can begin to feel tedious and uncomfortable. On longer runs you will often feel stiff for the first mile, only to suddenly realize that somewhere in the middle of the second your stride has become open and elastic.

Running teaches you to look for your stride in the second mile. That’s where you’ll find it. Nothing before that moment counts. Mile-long sessions are exercises in frustration. My mind is always aimed toward a long haul. Those new runners who work best during short bursts should switch to CrossFit before the changes become irreversible.

My body is quite unlike the one I would have had if my friend and I had decided to quit the team halfway through October 2002. More than that: It is unlike the one my genes would have predicted. I have yet to join the men in my family, who, even when physically fit, seem to get a little rounder in their 20s. I do not know what my resting natural body is like. It and I are strangers.

My doctor recently told me that we no longer know what my genetic cholesterol predisposition looks like because I have been running for so long. Physicians have long thought I was naturally hypoglycemic, but a new doctor suggested that I may very simply have been running so much that my body’s blood sugar is kept artificially low. I could even be prediabetic, he joked, but we might never know, because I’m essentially always starving.

Those of us who have been running since before puberty are distinctly out of touch with our baselines in every physical sense. We do not know what normal is. It is like a system whose equilibrium has been attacked. Even those of us who run for miles in the woods nevertheless remain detached from the natural order of our bodies.

What a strange, lonely idea, that running should pull us further away from our true natural selves, the selves we are at rest — the selves we were meant, in every sense, to be. Our body’s universe has been completely disturbed. Yes, my body is a lot thinner than it might have otherwise been at 25, but it is also pockmarked with injuries that I never would have had.

Running, one orthopedist insisted, is highly injurious on the body. I am incredibly injury prone — a torn Achilles tendon in 2014, broken ribs this fall, chronic IT band problems, quad weakness, years of knee pain, neck stiffness.

My first injury was the strange growth of bone and ligament by my knee called Osgood-Schlatter, a common ailment in teenagers that took me out of commission for the last season of middle school track. My second serious injury was freshman year of college, which turned out to be another common runner’s issue called patellofemoral pain syndrome.

Running long term has trashed certain parts of my body. Runners subconsciously learn to downplay the severity of symptoms when being checked out for an injury, hoping somehow that underreporting pain will force the universe to accept your hopeful words as gospel, that speaking this incantation of backward superstition will somehow make it true and that you will get the green light from your doctor and go back to running sooner than expected simply because you wished it.

It won’t. But you’ll go out running anyway, and you might even hurt yourself.

Even Metzl, whose research suggests that runners have lower rates of depression and lower risk of heart disease and cancer, understands the risks associated with running. Distance training can cause loss of fast-twitch muscles, and so running, he says, should be accompanied by strength training to aid in injury prevention.

The ever-present risk of injury stimulates hyperawareness of each joint. The creak in your left knee is like the voice of an old friend; you can never entirely forget the specter of a dormant inflammation in your hip, kept at bay only with meticulous stretching and icing. You silently groan before a long flight of stairs.

But with this also comes a heightened acuity for understanding the other mechanics of your body. Long-term runners do not need GPS watches to time their mile paces or know how far they’ve run, or heart rate monitors. Calculating these metrics without the use of technology is a learned instinct and, when in the company of new runners, something like a party trick that amazes them as though you had just pulled a quarter out from behind their ear.

After all these years, it is unclear to me whether my body is a finely tuned microchip or a lug nut that has been stripped of its edges from years of abuse. Whatever the case, my body yearns for those moments when it feels most worn out after a long run. Because my notion of pain has been changed over time, so too has my notion of pleasure. From this source of pain the body procures absolute pleasure.

With time you begin to revel in these moments when the movement of each joint is sluggish as though injected with grains of wet sand and glassy mineral, and when a flush of warm blood sweeps across your face like a mask. The air draws violently through your nostrils, carrying with it a noxious vapor of salty moisture lifting up from your skin, mixed with dirt kicked up from your shoes.

In the next hour you will hardly be able to go from one corner of your apartment to the next. Your body has been ground down to a powder, rubbed raw like an element stripped of its valence electrons.

This very sensation was one I used to dread during my first years as a runner. It is perhaps this same fear that keeps so many people from taking up running to begin with. And yet I have come, with time, to feel most like myself during these moments. The world changes entirely when you are worn out from a long run, and you almost begin to feel new again, as though during each negative split mile you were shedding not only entire seconds from your pace, but parts of yourself as well. Those parts are forever lost to the run.

For a few moments, as you pick yourself up from the slumped position and fight through the urge to vomit and catch your breath, you live completely unencumbered. The post-run daze, which for new runners is understood only as the moment of greatest discomfort, is the closest thing to serenity that exists for old runners. It is chased, literally, for miles.

Time teaches you to find a home in this moment — a sense of belonging, or even a sense of natural order — as though it is only then that the real fog clears.

Stranger yet, in this clearness you find changes in yourself. You do not feel the need to brush off the thin film of dirt against your palms. In winter you are warm, and in summer cool. The thirst you felt in the third mile has vanished. Aches from the fourth mile have died down. You feel only the buzz, as though nothing but the body exists, and you are drawn to basic indulgences that would have been an assault to your whole being after a workout in your early years as a runner. Beer, drunk in this state, tastes like the sweetest nectar. You drink it as though nothing else matters, and wonder, as though it were the first you ever had: Should anything on Earth ever be allowed to feel this good?

Alexander Aciman is a writer living in New York. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Tablet, the New Republic, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter.

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