Back in 2006, a guy knocked on the door to the recording studio I owned at the time. He was white, in his mid-thirties, built like a marine with a tapered hair cut.

“I have some musical equipment I’m looking to sell,” he said. “You interested?”

“What do you have?” I replied.

We walked out to his car, where his girlfriend was sitting in the passenger seat, staring out the window and chewing gum.

He popped the trunk and it felt like one of those cartoons where someone opens up a treasure chest and a beaming ray of light comes shining out, blinding everyone with its glare.

“Wow,” I remarked, glancing at what was inside.

Sitting there, like a pirate’s long-lost booty, was an Emu SP-1200 drum machine.

To the average person, this would mean absolutely nothing, but to a hip-hop music producer, they would recognize this as one of the most iconic and celebrated electronic instruments ever invented.

An 80s-era relic, the SP-1200 drum machine, often paired with an Akai S-950 sampler, was the production set-up of choice for guys like Pete Rock, Marley Marl and the Beatminerz. Some of the best rap albums of all time were made with it.

I didn’t hesitate to ask— “How much?”

“Give me a thousand bucks,” he said. “And I’ll throw in an Akai S-950 and a mixing desk, too.”

There had to be a catch. All this for a thousand bucks? This guy was either a crackhead or he was crazy.

“Okay,” I said. “You’ve got a deal.”

“But wait,” he hesitated. “Hold on.”

I knew something was up.

“See, the thing is,” he muttered. “I’m not really sure if the SP-1200 works anymore. I’ll leave it with you. Mess with it. If it works, we can do this. If not, I’ll take it back. I don’t want to hustle you.”

I appreciated his honesty— this ruled out my crackhead theory— then wanted to know why he was even selling this stuff in the first place. An SP-1200 on eBay right now will cost you more than $2,500.

“I’m leaving for the army in a few days,” he said. “You know Mark Wahlberg, the actor, right? He used to rap. Marky Mark. I produced a bunch of stuff for him with this stuff, but as you can see, I don’t have any use for it now.”

Of course I knew who Marky Mark was. “Good Vibrations.” “Wild Side.” These are hip-hop classics and obviously some of the most important records in the genre’s history. [Editor’s note: he’s being sarcastic.]

I took the equipment out of his car into my studio, powered everything up and began fooling around with some sounds he gave me.

The drums sounded big and chunky; warm, like only something with 12-bit analog converters could deliver.

But the thing really was broken.

It could load sounds off of disks—big, floppy disks, the kind you used to use to play Oregon Trail with in public school—but the audio input, where you connect a device to sample something, was busted.

Consequently, everything I sampled was covered in static, white noise. I’d never be the next Pete Rock with this.

I called the guy back up, told him I didn’t feel right about buying the broken SP-1200, and that the deal was off.

He came by, picked up his stuff and drove away. I don’t know if he was angry about it, but I never saw him again and I never really got to use an SP-1200.

We like to fetishize old things. Comic books. Records. Tapes. Sneakers. Mason jars. What’s old is cool, and when something is cool it can become new again.

But this logic hasn’t really extended itself to the tools we use to make music. Old clunky drum machines may theoretically look and sound better, but you don’t see anyone running out and buying classic pieces of gear like the Roland TR-808, Akai MPC60 or SP-1200 every day.

Today’s producers primarily use software. That’s because it’s much easier and much cheaper to download a copy of Ableton Live, Propellerheads Reason or FL Studio, load it up with gigs upon gigs of drum samples that are easily available all over the internet, and then use the programs in conjunction with your computer and a MIDI controller to make beats.

These programs, even at their most basic levels, can do things that the aforementioned pieces of technology do, in a cinch. There are apps for iPhone and Android that can do almost everything an SP-1200 does and they cost next to nothing. It’s mind-blowing, but that’s how far we’ve come.

But the thing is, because software is easily acquired and just as easily updated from one version to the next, you don’t really think about it that much. The program as an ephemeral idea may be incredibly valuable to you, but if you were to lose it, you could just as easily download it again and your problem would be solved.

And only very rarely— like say, when key features get removed—does anyone want to go back to an earlier version of a program. For example, if Reason 8 is out, nobody is holding on to some long-lost appreciation for Reason 3. Nobody gives a shit. The workflow may be different, the program itself may be more intuitive and user-friendly, but ultimately the sound doesn’t really change. A beat made in Reason 3 sounds exactly the same in Reason 4, 5, 6 and 7.

But you can’t really say that about beats made with classic drum machines, or any piece of music equipment, really. Because they are physical objects, machines—with moving parts that were put together and must work together harmoniously in order to produce the sound that they make—they have a certain character to them.

Take the Akai S-950 sampler, for example. One of the S-950's features is an analog low-pass filter, and when used effectively, it can help bring out the rich bottom-end frequencies of a sample (Black Moon’s “Buck ‘Em Down” is a great example, so is Nas’ “It Ain’t Hard To Tell”), i.e. the bassy part. The producers are the producers, but without the Akai S-950, nineties-era hip-hop, murky basslines and all, never quite happens the way it does.

Conversely, if you passed me a copy of FL Studio, you couldn’t quite tell me that x, y and z’s album was made on it, even if it was, because every copy of FL Studio is exactly the same. The parts that move, they are digital and arguably don’t even exist. Yes, there is programming architecture that makes the program work, but I will never physically touch FL Studio, and neither will the people who make music on it. Therefore, it doesn’t have that same worn-in feel. There’s no history there. No story. Nobody is ever going to knock on the door to my studio, tell me they made a bunch of records with the software, then try to sell it to me.

I’m not saying software has no value. I’m just saying it’s boring.

I miss drum machines. I miss the way they feel, the way they sound and the way they inspired me to make music.

One of the great things about using an old drum machine is that you could just turn it on and get to work. Unlike modern-day software and hardware controllers, with all their bells and whistles, older gear is so pedestrian and uncomplicated. Don’t mistake ease-of-use for being easy, though. You had to look at little screens, press small buttons, move around jog wheels and fool around with floppy disks. Most machines had limited memory, so you had to find workarounds for sampling loops and things of that nature; mostly, you had to work just to make things sound right. It wasn’t like you just pressed a button and poof! a beat came out.

Things are much different now.

Computers are so powerful and data storage is so expansive that you could sample every piece of music in existence, continuously, and still not run out of sample time. There isn’t even a thing called ‘sample time’ anymore. What’s more, most production software these days makes chopping samples—where you break a piece of music into a bunch of smaller pieces, then replay it how you see fit—so easy that it almost feel like you’re not doing anything. There isn’t that much work involved. You import a sample and it’s already done for you. You’ve got your 24-inch monitor or your laptop, your mouse or your trackpad, and you’re off and running. Load up a few professionally-customized sound packs, drag and drop a few loops from your software’s browser, add a few notes in the piano roll, and boom, you’re practically the next Kanye West.

Because things are so easy, something is inherently lost. I suppose that’s the nature of anything that gets automated. Here I am lamenting the way drum machines sound, but remember, the drum machine replaced the drummer!

Still, there is truth to what I’m suggesting. Roger Linn, who invented the MPC, as well countless other drum machines, had this to say in an interview last year:

I notice many musicians spending countless hours learning how to microscopically edit their music in order to get it to sound right. I can’t help but imagine a skilled drummer quietly chuckling inside when they see someone going to so much trouble in order to avoid learning to play the instrument skillfully. At a certain point, it might just be easier to focus on developing the skill to play it.

And that’s the problem now in a nutshell. It’s more important than the character and color that gets lost going from hardware to software. It’s the whole methodology and framework for how we think about making music in the first place.

A drum machine—or even a keyboard workstation and guitar, for that matter—offers an experience that is primarily aural. The pieces of it, the keys, strings, the drum pads, whatever, they inspire you to begin making music by playing something. They are physical objects and they require you to physically interact with them in order to produce sound.

You don’t need to do that in order to produce something electronically. Making music with software is a visual experience. You look at it, start implementing your vision, often without even needing to touch the keyboard at all, then keep shaping and refining until you have something you like. The program is like a canvas, and you can just throw shit at it, a la Jackson Pollock.

This is kinda cool and awesome in its own way, but there is an aspect of working like that which strikes me as terribly counter-intuitive. Because when you can just tinker with things until they are right, there is less incentive to strive for remarkability in its own right.

Imagine any classic recording artist having the ability to sit there in a program and move notes around, change keys and alter the swing of their rhythm tracks instantly. They’d never bother with getting good at making music. They’d just make sure the music got done.

And so there is value in the limitations of older technology, drum machines and the like, beyond the point of fetishizing them merely because they’re old and look cool. These limitations force creators to use technology in clever and unique ways, push them incredibly hard to get the sound out that they hear in their heads and leads to better, more inventive music. That, ultimately, is what ignites real progress. And that’s why drum machines, antiquated and all, really matter.