Vintage Simmons Drums (UK) Users Group

Michael Buchner grew nostalgic:
> 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...

That idea was splendid!

> 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. 

*haha* Yes, that's a laugh these days. I've seen the 5-card setup
mentioned though but after that it's basically anarchy out there. My
customized Ultravox machine has bass, snare, octaban, octaban, bass,
snare, octaban, octaban. I bet that's quite unique. :D

> 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. 

That fact makes it even more tempting to move them around if you ask a
sound junkie like me.

> 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.

I see the problem from a drummers point of view but as a fan of analogue
electronics I LOVE this unpredictability.

> 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

Great story and a splendid finale there Michael! :D

-- 
electronically yours, jesper
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