HANDS UP who knows the meaning of the word 'consolidation'? Yes, you at the back, Linn senior.

"Please miss, consolidation is when you don't actually do anything new, but take lots of individual bits that have been around for a while and put them together so they become an exciting unit, greater than the sum of its parts."

An elegant exposition, Master Linn, and dead right when it comes to the Linn 9000 — a digital drum machine and touch sensitive 32-track MIDI sequencer. Neither are bedazzling leaps in technology but the combination is so sensible, flexible and creative that hungry artists have been queuing up with their four-and-a-half grand ever since the mechanism arrived.

It is not intended to replace the Linndrum though there are several improvements on the drum machine side that will make '2' owners stare deep into the folds of their purses. The argument runs that however elaborate your connections and communications may be between separate drum boxes and sequencers, nothing can beat the speed and ease of application of a single unit that knows its own mind.

Viewed in the glare of 84's drunk-at-a-party approach to MIDI technology — talks to everyone but nobody's certain how to stop it — the 9000 might seem a backward step. What happens, f'rinstance, if you tire of one half of the device. Can't chop it in two and head for the classifieds.

Yet considered as a new, self-contained instrument in its own right, the 9000 stands up to scrutiny very well. At least the insides do. The outsides have been modelled in early WW2 battleship offering plenty of speckly grey metal and round 'bulkheady' corners. Would double as a fine fall-out shelter.

The vital success of the two-in-one construction is that the 9000 understands itself. For example, if you've recorded a four-bar drum pattern and then go on to produce a 16-bar synth sequence — programmed in real time from a MIDI keyboard — the drum machine will kindly loop the drum pattern four times, without being asked. This, and many other examples of self-comprehension, are what make the 9000 fast and creative to use. You can speedily develop ideas while the inspiration is firing, without having to pause and re-instruct the machinery.

But let us get physical. The 9000 has 18 digitally-sampled percussion voices summoned by three rows of square, rubberised pads, each velocity sensitive. The harder you hit, the louder the drum. Directly above are 20 sliders, mixing the drums plus two external channels for the levels of, say, two MIDI synths 'passing through'. Above them are another 20 sliders, this time with a much shorter throw, and they will position the sounds in the stereo output. Each drum does have a standard jack socket output all of its own.

Importantly, any pattern you load into the 9000 will include the dynamic information it receives from the pads and the mix set on the sliders. Both can be edited during playback. Tweaking one of the sliders will return you to manual control on that drum and leave the others alone. You can erase any drum by holding the erase button in the bottom right-hand corner of the 9000 while pressing the appropriate drum pad — either a single, errant beat or the entire pattern entry.

Unlike Doctor Who and the brilliant things you say when drunk, the 9000 exists only in real time. You tap out the drum pattern to a metronome, and play in the sequences to a drum beat. Moot point, this. There are those who would say that at four-and-a-half grand, the 9000 is obviously a top whack professional machine for people who prefer to 'perform' their music rather than dial it in. And there are those who would say that at four-and-a-half grand, the 9000 should offer the choice of real and step time so you can decide.

Perhaps Linn themselves are uncertain and are awaiting feedback from a 9000 audience. There are several spare buttons on the front panel, as yet without function, doubtless reserved for 'software updates'. If step-time proves a popular request, Linn will likely find a way in. Anyway, it's by now patently daft for any musician, manufacturer or hack to presume that step time is a less professional method of making music. There are plenty of very successful records to put you right on that score.

The Linn's programming is auto correcting and that goes for the drum and synth sections. The finest resolution is 96th notes, but if you're fussy the auto correct can be turned off at the expense of requiring much more memory to recall a sequence.

Experimenters have commented, and a trial substantiated, that the auto correct will pull synth notes into line rather than letting them start wrong and snipping them off when they've over-stayed their welcome.

As for the drums themselves, they speak up in the following tones: a bass drum, a snare, four toms, a hi-hat (open or closed), cowbell, tambourine, high and low congas, cabasa, claps, two rides, two crashes and a sidestick.

Completing the panel are two columns of buttons (34 in all) that instruct the Linn in the tasks it should carry out — anything from selecting the auto correct, to running the tape dump, copying bars from one section of a sequence to another and requesting help. Later production models will have a short guide to the 9000's abilities written into the memory and which can be displayed on the two-level LCD screen in the top right-hand corner.

Less visible, incidentally, is the 3.5in disc drive unit reachable through a flap on the front edge of the machine. The disc can store compositions AND sound samples. You will be able to feed four of your own choices into the memory in this way. The Linn as standard won't sample drums itself, that you'll have to do elsewhere, but it can provide the brain cells to incorporate them into your patterns.

While still on the noises the 9000 makes, they are not all separate samples. Of the four tom options, you can have a maximum of two blatting out at once — the remaining pair are different tunings of the original two samples. Same goes for the two rides and two crashes. One way round this restriction would be to duplicate a tom or ride within one of the four extra spaces allowed for on the 9000.

You might want to play the same trick on the snare so you could bounce backwards and forwards for unclipped flams and fast rolls.

News for existing Linn owners... you won't be able to take your favourite chips and transfer them to the 9000. The sampling is better, they say (12K bandwidth) and the systems are not compatible. There is still the option of the disc or cassette load, as we said.

Finally, for those still unrecovered from the velocity sensitive pads (eight levels of dynamics, and you'll be able to get full-sized, external drums to take their place), here's another bonus. Built into the programming is a repeat function. As long as you continue to hold down the pads, they'll add in a drum on every beat, depending how fine (96 per bar) or coarse (16, eight, four, two per bar) you've set the resolution. Brilliant for fast rolls a la "Blue Monday" bass drum, and there's more. You can alter the level of the sound by leaning into the pad, almost like a second touch facility. Adds enormously to the expression and feel the 9000 can create. And it's an effect you can perform, not calculate and punch in.

The most immediately enticing application is to squeeze the hi-hat up and down — you can also dictate the decay of each hi-hat note (as would a drummer's left foot) by playing with a decay slider to the left of the pads, in all, a vast improvement in mood and emotion. The 9000 is deceptively human for a box with lots of silicon inside it. In attitude and interpretation, it owes more to the Fairlight's Page R than to anything else among its rivals.

The 9000 can remember 50 patterns (expandable via an extra memory card). You construct and order them using a 16-Key controller beneath the LCD screen. The number of bars over which the pattern is to run, its time signature and the measure are programmed by moving a cursor beneath the appropriate figure in the LCD window, and writing in the info via the keys. Tempo can be punched in (down to tenths of a BPM), or the Linn will work out the correct pace if you tap it out on a button in the lower right-hand corner. Two or three taps is enough.

You begin playing after the Linn has given you an intro count. Once finished you can go back and overdub extra drums, take others out, and so on. By changing the auto correction on overdub, you can use the repeat facility to play across the beat. Makes you sound a very talented drummer.

At this stage the 9000 starts to shift away from the commonly accepted methods of composing sequenced music. There are no divisions into 'songs' as with Rolands, Yamahas, etc. The 9000 treats all its material as sequences. Patterns '3', '4' and '5' might be made into sequence '1'. Sequences '1', '2' and '3' can be joined and renamed sequence 4. Sequences '1', '2' and '3' still exist, until you write over them, so you could now take '1', '2' and '3', add them to '4' and rename the whole lot as '5', repeating the process ad infinitum.

The same system is applicable to the synth sequencing section which we'll stroll onto in a minute. You might criticise its vagueness. If 'songs', 'sequences' and mere 'patterns' are all worked out on the same scratchpad, how can you remember which is which? On other machines a song is a song because you know you've switched to another part of the memory to define it.

More juggling to carry out in the mind, then, but perhaps it's closer in method to the way you write a tune — gradually adding sections together; developing a verse from a few bars; treating them as one chunk and improvising over the whole lot; tacking on a chorus and considering that combination as a single entity; finally deciding you'd like it to happen twice, verse/chorus/verse/chorus, and so on.

The Linn offers two trigger outs, assignable to any drum, and five trigger ins for the external pads. And now for the synthy bit.

The music sequence section can control up to 16 parts, each on its own MIDI channel, and can layer up to 32 tracks. It's envisaged by Linn that the 9000 will be at the core of your studio/stage set up. To this end it has a facility dubbed MIDI Echo which will take the notes you're playing from one keyboard and re-output them on a different MIDI channel — a boon for those synths which can only transmit and receive on one channel at a time.

Theoretically, you can write the whole piece at home with one Linn 9000 and one poly, and only connect the rest of the keyboards when you trot into the studio with the 9000 under your arm.

Starting a sequence is again a matter of defining the track, the time signature, measure, number of bars, and so forth. You might already have chosen and perfected the drum pattern to go with it, or you might have put down a simple guide beat intending to return and enlarge upon the percussive wealth when all the notes are decided upon.

The polyphonic limit is dictated not by the Linn but by the number of notes the synthesiser itself can generate. Rewriting of sequences after the event can function in several ways. Taking out one note involves playing back the sequence while pressing the note on the keyboard that you want to lose at the moment you want to lose it. Whole bars can be vanquished by telling the 9000 how many bars you want to erase (say 3), where the deletion begins (bar 5) and where it should end (7).

Sequences can be copied and more notes overdubbed on later run throughs, again up to the polyphonic limit of the keyboard.

There are insert and merge facilities (extenders and blenders) and the maximum number of bars any single sequence can contain is determined more by the 999 limit on the LCD than any memory trouble. You can ask the Linn to start playback at any point, again be specifying the bar number, and though not a facility incumbent in the review sample, you should be able to transpose sequences with the flick of a button on the production models.

Apparently the sync click the 9000 puts out is SMPTE-like. It may not contain all the information that system entails, but it will supply a different, identifiable code for every frame. If you're really set on soundtracking, then you can buy a SMPTE card to drop into the Linn's innards.

While your hand is in the pocket, you might consider purchasing an additional 128K RAM board to double the memory space, and there is talk of an input sampling card so the 9000 will be able to listen to your acoustic drums/gravel/casserole dish making a noise, wrap it up in a chip and spit it out under instruction.

To be honest I didn't find the isolated drum voices of the Linn radically different from previous models — slightly 'bigger' drums, maybe, and a little more top and stick in the cymbals — but not a noticeably longer decay. Still the amount of expression available in the programming gets them sounding more convincing as a kit that's being played rather than a collection of samples being read out. Even the dynamic response of the pads is variable so you can adjust them to your own developing 'technique'.

A machine to be played rather than merely programmed.

LINN 9000: £4495

CONTACT: Syco Systems, (Contact Details)