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

I fully agree with Michael's comments. There are people who can repair this gear but it is very time consuming and ultimately costs money. I have repaired many Simmons units and most of the faults are due to age or sadly with some units, poor build quality. This is not a poor reflection of simmons themselves. Most of the units were heavily hand built, built during a time where demand outstripped the ability to supply etc. Like an old car, don't buy one expecting to get years of trouble free use. These bits of old kit need regular TLC to keep them running. If you can't afford to do this or don't have the knowledge to do it yourself, vintage music gear is not for you. If you intend to hit the road and gig with them, expect things will go wrong. For gigging an old unit, you really need to go over any old gear resoldering all joints, replacing electrolytic capacitors, tightening screws, cleaning plugs etc. Yes there are people who will help keep it all going and many have spent lots of hours redrawing schematics etc. I myself have been slowly redrawing PCB's etc so at some point in the future new boards "could" be produced to keep the gear running. The SDS9 was a kick arse design that used a close connection between hardware and software to produce it's sounds, eproms for samples, curtis chips for analogue and the cpu itself generates the bassdrum waveshape in realtime. So it makes sense things will and do go wrong with them.