How Prince Turned a Clinical Electronic Beat Into Something Erotic and Human

The Linn LM-1 drum machine

Meet our newest writer and DJ, Michelle Wanderi, joining us from Nairobi, Kenya. By day, she’s grinding through a Data Science and Analytics degree at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), and on the side she’s training as a bartender to stack some extra cash toward tuition — still about 35,000 Kenyan shillings (roughly $300) short of her goal. If you want to help her close that gap, you can donate to her PayPal at wanderimichelle1@gmail.com. She first stumbled onto our Lyrical Limelight pieces and slid into our inbox asking how to get started writing herself, sending along stories of late-night sets and the way certain tracks rewire a room. Behind the decks, she chases grooves that feel both mechanical and alive — so it tracks that she locked onto Prince, the Linn LM-1 Drum Computer, and the way one man turned an early drum computer into something that breathes. What follows is Michelle’s love letter to that sound.

The first time I heard Prince, it wasn’t “Purple Rain” or “When Doves Cry”. It was “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)”, tucked deep into the 1999 album — a glitchy prayer over what sounded like a drum machine having a nervous breakdown. The drums felt rigid and machine-perfect, yet somehow… anxious, sensual, alive. The way his voice floated over those patterns, the strange chords, the empty space between hits. I hadn’t heard anything like it.

That one song sent me down the rabbit hole: 1999 front-to-back, then Purple Rain, then older records. You start out thinking, “Wow, he’s an incredible singer.” A few hours later you realize: this man is also the drummer, the guitarist, the bassist, the keyboardist — and in a lot of cases, the entire band.

And nowhere does that alchemy show more clearly than in what he did with the Linn LM-1 Drum Computer.

A machine built to be perfect

When guitarist and designer Roger Linn released the LM-1 in 1980, it wasn’t meant to sweat. It was built to correct drummers.

Unlike earlier rhythm boxes that spat out synthetic bleeps, the LM-1 was one of the first programmable drum machines and the first to use digital samples of real acoustic drums. Its 12 sounds — kick, snare, hi-hat, cabasa, tambourine, two toms, two congas, cowbell, clave, and handclaps — were stored as 8-bit samples at about 28 kHz, each individually tunable with its own output jack on the back panel.

On paper, it was a studio engineer’s dream: locked-in timing with quantization and shuffle, realistic drum hits that didn’t wear out like tape loops, and separate outputs so you could EQ, compress, and drench each sound in reverb independently. Only about 500 of these machines were ever made. They were expensive, rare, and, if used “correctly”, clinical.

Most artists treated the LM-1 like a glorified metronome with better sounds. Program a beat, hit play, move on. Prince took one look at that same machine and basically said: What if this thing could feel like another human in the room?

Prince, the one-man rhythm section

Here’s where Prince’s multi-instrument brain comes in.

By the time he got his hands on the LM-1, he’d already proven he didn’t need a band to sound like a band. On his debut album For You (1978), the official credits spell it out in one line: “Produced, arranged, composed, and performed by Prince.” Every vocal, every instrument, every arrangement — him.

Session notes and gear archives point out that he handled at least 27 different instruments on that record: multiple electric and acoustic guitars, bass, several keyboards and synths, drum kit, and a small arsenal of percussion.

So when he sits down with a drum machine, he isn’t a keyboard player poking at pads for the first time. He’s a full rhythm section in one body, squeezing that knowledge through a tiny plastic interface.

That’s why the Linn never sounds like “just a box” in his hands. It sounds like a drummer who has been listening to funk, soul, and rock their entire life and is now trapped inside 8-bit samples, trying to claw their way out.

Detuning the future: making the LM-1 breathe

The stock LM-1 sounds are “nice” in a very early-digital, hi-fi way. But Prince rarely left them stock.

He made the most of two key LM-1 features: tune knobs for each individual sound, and individual outputs for every drum voice so each hit could go to its own channel, effect, or pedal.

Instead of simply loading a preset bossa nova or rock pattern, he would retune the samples until they barely sounded like drums at all — kicks turned into knocking wood, tambourines into loose metal shivers, snares pitched into alien thuds. Roger Linn himself has talked about Prince tuning the LM-1’s kick way down to get that signature “knocking” tone and mangling tambourine samples until they became a loose metallic rattle.

From there, he’d route those individual outputs into outboard gear meant for guitars: Boss pedals, wah-wahs, reverb units, whatever was lying around Paisley Park. Engineers who worked with him recall how he would “dial in the sound for the percussion” on a pedalboard like he was shaping a guitar solo, a trick other producers later copied.

This is how you get those nervy, piston-like grooves on “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)” with the LM-1 hammering away in inhumanly perfect sixteenth notes, but textures that feel splintered and emotional.

He wasn’t trying to make the machine sound like a “better” drummer. He was trying to make it sound like something new.

1999: the sound of a synthetic apocalypse

All of that experimentation snaps into focus on 1999 (1982), the first Prince album where the Linn LM-1 becomes the spine of the whole record.

On 1999, the LM-1 is featured on every track, shaping what would become his signature early-’80s sound. That album gave us his breakthrough hits “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” and delivered his first US Top-10 album.

Listening to it front-to-back, you can feel how obsessed he was with that machine. The kick patterns are often simple, but the off-kilter snare placements, ghost hits, and tuned-percussion accents create this hypnotic, almost cinematic grid. It’s dance music, but there’s something anxious and erotic in the way the drums refuse to sit still.

“Little Red Corvette” instantly became one of my favorites. It’s soaked in that warm, neon-blue 1980s feeling, yet it hits like a memory I don’t actually own. I wasn’t there, but when that LM-1 groove settles in, it makes me feel nostalgic for a world that existed long before me — a parking lot night, headlights cutting across synths, something dangerous and hopeful at the same time.

And “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)” feels like 1999’s strange cousin: same machine, but now it’s glitching emotionally. Those rigid LM-1 hits and queasy synths sketch a person falling apart because love doesn’t make sense anymore.

The Linn wasn’t just a rhythm tool here. It became his emotional barometer.

From Linn boxes to laptop kids

Here’s the part that’s wild: what Prince did with the LM-1 in the early ’80s is now standard practice in every bedroom studio on earth. Articles on drum-machine history talk about how the LM-1’s sampled realism helped turn programmed drums into a serious alternative to live kits, right alongside the Roland TR-808 and TR-909.

Today’s DAW-based producers think nothing of zooming into each kick, snare, and clap, pitch-shifting, warping, saturating, and re-EQ-ing individual hits until they match the sound in their heads. Prince was doing that in the tape era, using nothing but the LM-1’s tuning knobs, a console, and a bunch of pedals.

Decades later, he looked at this new wave of computer-based producers and gave a pretty blunt verdict: “The kid with the PC in the bedroom can’t play his instrument.” He never stopped reminding people that his shows were “real music by real musicians,” even while he kept using drum machines and samplers.

That’s the tension at the heart of his LM-1 work: yes, it’s a machine. But it’s being driven by someone who already knows how to play everything the machine is pretending to be.

When you remember that on earlier records like For You he literally was the drummer, bassist, guitarist, and keyboardist, it makes sense that his programmed beats feel so human. The LM-1 wasn’t replacing a band for him; it was extending one.

A legacy baked into the grid

The relationship between Prince and the Linn LM-1 is so tight that other producers had to consciously avoid copying it. Producer Jimmy Jam has described how Prince’s close association with the LM-1 pushed him and Terry Lewis toward the Roland TR-808 on early SOS Band work, just to stay out of his sonic shadow.

Prince kept the LM-1 close throughout the ’80s and beyond, returning to it even after newer drum machines and samplers hit the market. By then, the “Prince Linn sound” had already seeped into pop, R&B, rock, and everything in between.

That’s the funny thing about a device designed for mechanical perfection: in the right hands, it becomes a fingerprint instead of a stencil.

Personal afterbeat

For me, this whole obsession — the deep dives into articles, the gear-nerd rabbit holes, the playlists — has become a way of remembering and honoring Prince.

He shows me what it looks like to push past the obvious settings, both in sound and in life. To take a piece of gear that everyone else uses one way and ask, “What if I do the wrong thing on purpose?” To be brave enough to be the entire band if you have to.

His work makes me want to be weirder and more experimental with my own music. To let my drums be a little too raw or too strange if that’s what the song demands. To treat every plugin and every sample like the LM-1: not as a preset dispenser, but as raw material to ruin in beautiful ways.

If you want to hear how deep that rabbit hole goes, there’s a great Spotify playlist that collects tracks built on Linn drum machines, including a lot of stone-cold classics. It’s a crash course in that punchy, digital-but-human sound.

Linn Drum Machine playlist on Spotify:

Put on headphones. Start with “1999”, “Little Red Corvette”, and “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)”. Pay attention to the drums — the way they’re too perfect to be human, and somehow too emotional to be anything else.

That’s Prince and the Linn LM-1, still breathing inside the grid, and echoing all the way from Nairobi dance floors to yours.

Ways To Support

Subscribe to us, or if you’ve ever thought about making your own music or jumping into a collab with Ravetopia/Way Of The Leaf Records, you can use our DistroKid link to get your tracks on all the major platforms: sign up for DistroKid here. Any official collabs released through Way Of The Leaf Records will include a 50% royalty split with you.

If you like the videos we’ve been creating with our sponsor Neural Frames and want to craft your own visuals, you can get started with them using this link: sign up for Neural Frames here.

These are affiliate links, which means you support our artists and future projects just by using them to sign up — at no extra cost to you.