[sdiy] learning from early drum machines?

[Scott Nordlund]

I have schematics for the Paia drum machine (scanned from a magazine article, I can email them to you), but I only gave it a brief glance- the circuit description doesn't really cover the write mode.  Anyhow it seems like a pain to use.  The DR-55 seems like a better design to me.  It's very simple (4 sounds) but could easily be expanded, assuming the "write one bit at a time" hack works for newer chips.  I think it would be relatively cheap and easy to build something like that (compared to using 128 switches or something), and the result would be totally usable if you don't mind that it's missing some of the "conveniences" of nearly every other programmable drum machine.  You could easily store 1024 64-step patterns of 7 or 8 sounds (64 kByte) in battery-backed RAM.
 
Anyway, if you wanted to use switches, you could use DIP switches.... it wouldn't be any fun to use, but it would be compact and relatively cheap.
 
Microcontrollers shouldn't be scary, especially as they can now be programmed in Basic or C rather than assembly language.  It's not exactly trivial to make a drum machine out of that, especially if you want x0x style programming, real time write, pattern chaining, etc., but all the same I don't see the point in putting off learning something like that if it would come in handy later.
 
Alternatively you could just use some sort of MIDI-to-trigger thing that someone else has built and sequence it from anything you want.

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> From: subjectivity at hotmail.com
> To: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> Subject: RE: [sdiy] learning from early drum machines?
> Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2009 17:07:20 +0000
>
>
>
> "> I'm not really familiar with the Paia Programmable Drums thing, but it seems to rely on a similar trick to write one bit at a time, while having a cruder (?) programming interface.
>>
>> Of course, none of these allow the patterns to be arranged into a song, MIDI in/out, etc. All the really interesting territory opens up only when you start with a micro controller.
> "
>
> OK-thanks
>
>
> 1. anyone have schematics for the PAIA drum machine?
>
> 2. How do you go about learning how to use micro controller,
> and then learn how to make the brain of a drum machine with one?
> Are there books on this?
>
> Are there pre-made programs you can load into the PIC as examples?
> IT seems SO scary!
>
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