Roger Linn on drum machines and drummers

If you’re comparing a drum machine to a master drummer I would be one of those who argue that drum machines and quantization don’t have the same feel as a real drummer. But I don’t think most people use drum machines to replace history’s great drummers. They use drum machines to create a particular looped groove that works well in a particular musical context, with full knowledge that the drum machine won’t respond in dynamics or tempo to the other musicians, won’t spontaneously think of creative and complimentary drum parts drawn from a lifetime knowledge of thousands of recordings, and won’t produce subtly-nuanced percussive timbres by tapping, rubbing and bending a drum in hundreds of possible ways.