Mondo Knows Facts
One drum machine shaped a genre
The Akai MPC60 arrived in 1988 with pads and a sequencer in one box Its pads and swing timing made it quick to build a beat from sampled hits. Producers built whole records on the machine, and later models stayed in use for decades. Its timing quirks became part of the sound people copied. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
The Roland TR-808 built its drums from oscillatorsIt used no samples at all, only synthesised thumps and bursts of noiseThe Akai MPC60 combined pads, sampler and sequencerRoger Linn designed the 1988 machine around his velocity-sensitive padsA turntable became an instrumentMoving the record by hand while a needle reads it turns vinyl into a percussion sourceSampling had to be licensed after a 1991 rulingA court held that taking a recorded phrase without permission infringed the recordingHip hop started at a Bronx block partyA DJ isolating the percussion break gave dancers more of what they wantedHip-hop's birthday is traced to a party in the BronxDJ Kool Herc played at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue on 11 August 1973
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Tags: drum-machines, hip-hop, production
One drum machine shaped a genre: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The Akai MPC60 arrived in 1988 with pads and a sequencer in one box. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.