Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Vintage Simmons Drums (UK) Users Group

Imagine this: Once (1985?) Simmons promised a drummer to be able to leave his own SDS7 drumkit at home, go to a stage or studio anywhere on the planet, plug in the memory card and go exactly with his own personal sounds...
The first step to this must be: The right cards and eproms in the right slot. But: I never saw an SDS7 with the original recommended card sequence in my shop: bass, snare, tom1, tom2, tom3, I think Hihat was next and then the first crash cymbal, after that somewhere bass 2, well, read about that in the manual. When delivered, the units were fully equipped with sounds for the dedicated channels. But it made no sense, if you decided to put f.e. your Hihat card into slot 3, because the factory parameters there were thought for a high tom. Another example:
When I first transformed one of my tom cards to a cymbal (yes, because I didn't have the 690 Deutsche Mark for a sixth card these days and they still took 120 Deutsche Mark for the cymbal Eprom only, a lot of money...), I was dissapointed of the awaited cymbal sounds. But then they told me to put the former-tom-but-now-cymbal card to the crash cymbal slot, and: Voila, I had 50 sense-making cymbal sounds. They were factory- presetted on the seventh slot (or so).
Now it is getting more serious: Think about adjusting and tuning three toms in a row on your SDS7 brain, with three similiar cards and three similiar eproms (like "bright tom") You have the (intelligent and logical...) idea to program all parameters on each of your tom cards to the same value and vary only the individual pitches afterwards: I never was successful doing like that. One tom was dull, the other bright, one decay was longer, the other (with same value set) shorter, one tom clicked heavy, on the other softly. The tolerances of the electronic parts are definitely too big.
To get a good impression of this phenomenon, make the following experiment with all of your SDS7 cards by yourself: Put click, noise and digital noise to zero, filter freq 255, reso somewhere, decay 255. Analog vol to 255, analog mod to zero, analog pitch to something like 125. Now try to adjust the analog bend to a value where you can hear NO bend at all (neither up, nor down, sound has to stay at constant pitch): Is it 145? Then you are lucky: It is the standard zero bend value for analog sound source! And? On the next card? Is it 155? Oh, this means nothing, it is still good average. Now change the cards to other slots and try again: What happens?
In my opinion, the biggest trouble is caused by the cheap resistors, with tolerances up to more than 10%. They brought in gold plated fingers, Curtis ICs and the expensive "hybrid" SMD board, but took the cheapest coal resistors instead of metal foil ones. I had cards for repair, on which it was not possible to reduce click level to zero. On others, decay set to zero still was much longer than usual and useful.
So, to come to a conclusion: It is a dream to interchange sounds on SDS7s exactly, but not possible. Shared values might be a good start-off for own creations, but nothing more. But, nevertheless, I love all of my SDS7s.
Michael

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