Akai MPC60

After the 9000

Roger Linn had already tried to join sampled drums and a MIDI sequencer in the Linn 9000. After Linn Electronics closed, he began working with Akai on another answer to the same question. Linn says he designed the overall functions and interface, Alan Trimble developed the software with collaborators, David Cockerell designed the sound chip, and Akai in Tokyo built the electronics and mechanical form. The MPC60 was a collaboration, not a solo invention with a new badge.

The result arrived in 1988 under a new promise: MIDI Production Center. A contemporary British review saw a machine sturdy enough for the studio and portable enough to travel. Its sixteen velocity- and pressure-sensitive pads sat beside dedicated transport controls and a large eight-line display. It could sample drums and run the sequences that drove other instruments. The desk could begin at the MPC and extend outward through MIDI, rather than asking a drummer to follow a computer screen.

Sound in the pads

The original MPC60 sampled in a twelve-bit non-linear format at a fixed 40 kHz. Its standard memory held about thirteen seconds of audio; expansion doubled that. These figures mattered because the machine was designed chiefly for short percussive events. The user could place as many as thirty-two samples across two pad banks, tune and mix them, and send parts to separate outputs. A particular sample did not have to stay a single sound: the same recording could be assigned to several pads with different start and end points.

The controls explain the instrument better than the numbers. Full Level let a player ignore differences in strike velocity. Sixteen Levels laid one sound across all sixteen pads at graduated loudness. A pressure-sensitive pad could repeat notes at the selected timing interval, changing their level as the hand pressed harder or softer. The dedicated hi-hat control could move among open, middle and closed samples. These are not abstract editing features. Each one changes what the player can do in the moment, before the sequence becomes a file.

A song that can be changed

The MPC60 could keep sequences as separate sections, combine them into songs, and send their parts to external MIDI equipment. Its four MIDI outputs did not mean four independent banks of sixteen channels: the 1988 review found that the sixteen channels were assigned among the outputs. It also documented the instrument's strengths and its rough edges, including early sync problems and an occasional crash during editing. The original machine was capable, but its history should not be cleaned into a frictionless legend.

The disk drive was part of making a record with it. Sounds and sequences needed saving because working memory was lost when power went off. Every session had a second, quieter performance: naming, storing and retrieving the material that the pads made immediate. A later MPC could offer far more memory and a different workflow. This first model's short sample time and disks belong to its own story.

Outside the studio myth

The first documented MPC60 player in this chapter is not a hip-hop producer. In June 1988, percussionist Simon Limbrick described using one with Man Jumping, first playing sounds from the pads, then placing loose pulse and cross-rhythm parts beneath the group's improvisation. He moved recorded MIDI performances into the machine and cut the sections into Tokyo Mix, a piece for live performance. The same interview also recorded a failed transfer of a long composition that stopped during playback. Limbrick suspected event-memory pressure, but the cause was not established. That evidence shows both the reach and the limits of a new instrument, while keeping an unreleased performance separate from a claimed commercial record.

The later music changed what the MPC60 seemed to be for. Roger Linn recalls a prospective user asking for much longer sample time in order to build songs from recorded loops; Linn says he did not yet understand the demand. He also remembers hip-hop musicians using swing and touch-sensitive pads in ways that surprised him. Those are the designer's recollections, not proof that every celebrated sample record was made on the same model.

Sequencing a continuous suite

Ian Boddy’s The Uncertainty Principle, first released in 1993, places the MPC60 inside a different musical world. His release notes ↗ credit it for both sequencing and sampling, alongside an Atari running Cubase and other Akai samplers. The album was conceived as a continuous suite. Here the MPC60 belongs to the machinery of a long electronic journey, with sampled material and external instruments sharing the arrangement. Those credits describe the album’s equipment; they do not allocate individual sounds or tracks to the MPC60.

The instrument, the lineage

The MPC60-II of 1991 was closely related but physically distinct, with a revised case and headphone output. The MPC3000 of 1994 expanded sampling and sequencing substantially. The original MPC60 deserves to be seen at its own size: the grey body, dark pad field, angled screen, faders and rows of dedicated keys. What lasted was a way of working in which timing could be played, corrected, shifted, erased and played again without losing the performer at the centre of the process.

An early record, a later sound library

In the preserved transcript of his 1997 Keyboard interview, DJ Shadow identifies the first SoleSides record as the first record he made on an MPC60. He does not name that release in the passage. It is a smaller, earlier marker than Endtroducing.....: a musician recalling when the machine first became part of putting a record out. Read the interview transcript ↗.

The MPC60 name has also travelled into commercial sample collections. Rhythm Electronics’ 2021 Vintage Drum Machines for Roland MC-707 & MC-101 lists an MPC60 kit among sixteen sets of sounds and patterns. The publisher describes the samples as recordings of well-preserved hardware. This is a later sound-library claim, not a historic artist credit or evidence that the MPC60 had a fixed factory drum kit. Explore the release and its contents ↗.

A small recording system

The preserved Keyboard interview transcript describes Endtroducing..... as work made with an MPC60 MkII, a turntable and an ADAT recorder. The sampler’s short memory and the work of chopping records shaped the method, but the MPC was part of a recording system. The account does not assign every sound or later overdub to a particular device. Read DJ Shadow’s interview transcript ↗.