The Akai MPC (originally MIDI Production Center, now Music Production Center) is a series of music workstations produced by Akai from 1988 onwards. MPCs combine sampling and sequencing functions, allowing users to record portions of sound, modify them and play them back as sequences. The first MPCs were designed by Roger Linn, who had designed the successful LM-1 and LinnDrum drum machines in the 1980s. Linn aimed to create an intuitive instrument, with a grid of pads that can be played similarly to a traditional instrument such as a keyboard or drum kit. Rhythms can be built not just from samples of percussion but samples of any recorded sound. Development By the late 1980s, drum machines had become popular for creating beats and loops without musicians, and hip hop artists were using samplers to take portions of existing recordings and create new compositions. Grooveboxes, machines that combined these functions, such as those by E-mu Systems, required knowledge of music production and cost up to $10,000. The original MPC, the MPC-60, was a collaboration between the Japanese company Akai and the American engineer Roger Linn. Linn had designed the successful LM-1 and LinnDrum, two of the earliest drum machines to use samples (prerecorded sounds). His company Linn Electronics had closed following the failure of the Linn 9000, a drum machine and sampler. According to Linn, his collaboration with Akai "was a good fit because Akai needed a creative designer with ideas and I didn't want to do sales, marketing, finance or manufacturing, all of which Akai was very good at". Linn described the MPC as an attempt to "properly re-engineer" the Linn 9000. He disliked reading instruction manuals and wanted to create an intuitive interface that simplified music production. He designed the functions, including the panel layout and hardware specification, and created the software with his team; he credited the circuitry to a team led by English engineer David Cockerell. Akai did the production engineering, making it "more manufacturable". The first model, the MPC60 (MIDI Production Center), was released on December 8, 1988, and retailed for $5,000. It was followed by the MPC60 MkII and the MPC3000, and the MPC2000, which Linn did not work on. After Akai went out of business in 2006, Linn left the company and its assets were purchased by Numark. Akai has continued to produce MPC models without Linn. Linn was critical, saying: "Akai seems to