Vintage Simmons Drums (UK) Users Group

I've had a few Q's regarding the Paragon Systems four channel drum synth 
I won on th'bay recently. I had just tested it with pads and headphones 
up til now and wasn't too impressed by the "piouws" and "boings" but 
hooked it up in the studio today, fed it with a simple sequence of 
triggers and started fiddling with the knobs.

This odd english fellow is hiding some potential under the black skin. 
But before diving into that I want to leave a comment that tend to 
concern most machines of english make... British engineers must be 
crazy! :) Or how do you explain a 19" rack unit that have rack ears, but 
no pre-drilled holes, is something like 3½ rack units high and whos 
netto width will _maybe_ slip in between the rack rails... if you're 
lucky (mine didn't, by a millimeter). Morons!

Soundwise it's four identical channels in original, though one was known 
to be a bit defective and one proved to be either modified, defective 
(in a positive way) or just tweaked differently inside than the other 
three. More of this later...

Each channel has a noise section and a simple VCO section. Noise 
controls include what you'd expect: pitch, peak (filter), decay and 
volume. VCO is made up of pitch, sweep, decay and volume. Sweep is only 
from high to low frequencies and not the reverse or both would've been 
nice. There are no modulation source available (except live tweaking) 
and the only other controls are the sensitivity inputs.

This sounds quite crappy if you just read the specs, but when tweaking 
and testing a while I soon found out that this is the type of machine 
that is lousy when it comes to the things it was designed for. So no 
snappy techno kicks, no tight snares and quite lame hihats. But when 
taken beyond those demands, exploring the other end of the sonic 
palette, here's pure mayhem hidden. The oscillator drops looooow. I can 
get the cones in the studio speakers moving, without me hearing 
anything. There are also good stuff in the noise itself that makes it 
anything but the average white noise you're used to. It sounds very 
uneven with accented frequencies in the low and mid spectrum.

My unit was said to have a broken noise section in one of the channels. 
I might fix this one day though I like the short burst of noise it can 
add now and it worked really well as an accented hihat.

But the other odd channel have a noise section that self-oscillates in 
the most vicious way, unlike the other channels. This can be combined 
and tuned with the oscillator for a fleshy ringmod effect. Bad and 
lovely indeed. I hope this is the same on other units.

I had my doubts when I won the auction, but this one is a keeper. :D

-- 
electronically yours, jesper

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