Akai MPC-60

The Akai MPC-60 is a music workstation device - the first of the Akai MPC series, introduced in 1988. It enabled both recording of sound samples and sequencing them.

The MPC was designed by Roger Linn, who developed the hugely successful Linn LM-1 and LinnDrum drum machines using sampled sounds of real drums - manufactured by his company Linn Electronics. The Linn 9000 which succeeded the two, however, stalled due to software issues and thus led to the company's demise. Once he joined forces with Akai, he took his ideas with the 9000 a step further with the MPC-60. He wanted the MPC to be intuitive to operate, especially for those who dislike reading manuals.

Peter Gabriel owned (or still owns) an MPC-60, with which he programmed drum patterns and grooves as a foundation for song ideas since the late 1980s. He worked with all three Linn drum machines previously, so it seems natural for him to progress to the more advanced MPC-60. Albums-wise, he used the MPC-60 on the Passion (1989) soundtrack, Us (1992) and Up albums to date. As is with any instrument, Peter liked to add treatments to the MPC drum sounds - on "Digging In The Dirt", for example, the MPC beat was fed through Korg A2 and/or A3 processors.