Reprinted from the April 2003 issue of Canadian Musician

Road Test by Mike Turner

AdrenaLinn by Roger Linn Design

Warning! This piece of equipment will eat up hours and hours of your valuable time. It has an enormous amount of signal processing power and filtering capabilities combined with very potent MIDI synchronization. It also contains a drum machine, featuring some of the classic Linn Drum sounds, amplifier emulation with 3-band EQ and even delay! The user's manual is encyclopedic and complete, covering all relevant parameters and functions. Bearing in mind this unit is designed for use by guitar players, the nature of the unit might present some difficulties. The truth is, the average guitarist can plug this thing in and have a gas!

I'll try to keep the tech babble to a bare minimum here so hang on and pay attention. The AdrenaLinn first runs your guitar through a filter section, comprised of any one of, a 2- or 4-pole filter , a flanger, an inverted flanger and pitch or volume modulation. Here's where things get a lot more complicated: you can choose from 21 modulation sources to control these filters. In truth, there are three that are the most usable. First there is a 32-step sequencer, then an envelope generator and, finally, the trusty old LFO. This is the most powerful section of the AdrenaLinn and I'll give a bit more detail on it later.
Next is an amp modelling section featuring a dozen pretty decent amp models with boost and 3-band EQ followed by a delay and finally into the volume and panning section. At the same time there is a simple four-voice drum machine run by a 32-step sequencer. Here's the cool thing, the filter sequencer locks up to the drum machine. If you've ever messed around with the Z-Vex Seek-Wah, (a manual, 8-step, filter sequencer) you'll know how cool this can get. Even better is the fact that the AdrenaLinn is fully MIDI compatible. All of this for an MSRP of $549 and it comes in a package only a little bigger than two regular stompboxes!

Now all that's left is to plug it in and see what happens. This is the good news part of the story. Despite a complicated appearance, the AdrenaLinn is a pretty intuitive box. Plug in a guitar, amp or console or just headphones and you're off. There are four rotary controls across the top of the unit controlling which preset (in the signal processor) you're going through, which drum beat you're playing along with, what the tempo is and the overall volume. There are foot switches for both start and bypass for real-time control, so just hit start and away you go. Twiddle away and it becomes pretty clear what's going on and how cool this thing is. In fact, I'd guess this is the method most people will end up using to get what they need out of this unit. The thing is, if you're not careful you might just accidentally play for a few hours before you know any time has passed at all! This thing is just so much fun you can't help but sit around and noodle yourself silly. I got the most fun out of the sequenced filter section and just fooled around for hours before it occurred to me to try to actually do something with the AdrenaLinn.

The editing is pretty simple, but you can get lost so keep the user's manual nearby. To edit you use the previously mentioned four rotary controls and a pair of up and down buttons. Imagine a 4 x 8 bingo card with a parameter in each square. You use the up and down buttons to choose a row and then turn a rotary knob to choose a column and change the value of the parameter in that square. One layer deeper is the filter sequencer and the drum sequencer. The bingo card is then a 32-step sequencer with each square representing a 16th note. You can program a filter parameter or a drum sound source in each square and then set the tempo as needed. While on the subject of tempo, I connected the AdrenaLinn to my Pro Tools rig and as soon as I sent MIDI clock, the AdrenaLinn locked up to the track without so much as a hiccup. Just imagine how much more interesting a string pad would be with a little bit of rhythmic filtering, or how nice it would be to have a flanger sweep happen exactly where and when you want it to. This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as to what the AdrenaLinn is capable of, in fact, it's even more interesting to see what new things you can do rather than doing the same old tricks, even if you do get to do them a lot easier.

As a final exercise I thought it'd be good to set a goal and try to get there from scratch rather than just trolling through the presets. One of the coolest tremolo effects I can think of is the intro of The Smiths' "How Soon is Now?" so I thought it'd be as good a goal as anything. It took me no more than about 15 minutes to get it to happen, and that includes the drums! Just to push things a bit, I imported The Smiths' track into Pro Tools, set it to a grid and locked the AdrenaLinn to it. Let me put it this way, it took longer to get the track into Pro Tools than everything else.

The only thing to remotely miss the mark are the drum sounds, they're a little cheesy but the good news is that you can route the drum outputs to the filter bank inputs and get some crazy cool filtered loops to augment your tracks. One other niggling concern is that editing either of the sequences is a bit time intensive because you have to scroll around a lot while entering your info, but this can be taken care of using Sound Diver and a visual editor. Maybe you won't build an entire track off of these sounds but you will, without a doubt, make your tracks better with the AdrenaLinn.
For more production information, contact: Roger Linn Design, Berkeley, California, USA, www.rogerlinndesign.com, (510) 898-4878, sales@rogerlinndesign.com.

Mike Turner is a Toronto-based musician and producer who is best known for his previous role as guitarist for Our Lady Peace.