Tag: vintage

DIY, Gear

New software revives ddrum4

A virtual collaboration is helping bring a 25-year-old drum module into the 21st century. Three software tinkerers, collectively calling themselves Team ddrum4ui, recently unveiled an app that breathes new life into the iconic ddrum4 drum module by enabling editing of factory sound files and adding new audio samples to the brain and with some other features. Before examining the advances, it’s worth looking back at the history of the drum brain which is still sought after today. Brief history of the ddrum4 The ddrum4 hit the market in the late 1990s, when it was released by Swedish synth innovator Clavia, best known for the Nord keyboards. ddrum first emerged in the ‘80s with one of the early acoustic drum triggers. […]

Gear

Sneak peak: New Simmons pads

The last Simmons equipment rolled off the assembly line in 1999 – and many e-drummers are kicking themselves that they didn’t grab spare drum pads before they disappeared. Now, 25 years later, there’s a resurgence of interest in original analogue e-drum gear and any pads that appear in the second-hand market are quickly snapped up. But the scramble will soon be over, with a few key former Simmons guys collaborating to resume production of the iconic hexagonal pads. We’ll bring you all the details when the project is officially announced, but in the meanwhile, here is a picture of the new pads.

Gear, Industry

Keeping e-drum history alive

Allan Leibowitz looks at a couple of newish books on oldish gear. Interest in the history of e-drums has been growing lately, with increasing participation in online groups and internet searches about “vintage gear”. While there’s a lot of chatter, nostalgia and anecdotal ‘information’ out there, few people have done more to highlight the progress of this sector of the music instrument market than Alex Graham, a New Zealand-based musical instrument collector and drum machine enthusiast. Graham has not only amassed one of the largest drum machine collections in the world, he has also documented his instruments – and scores of others he has discovered in his pursuit of the “full story of electronic drums”. digitalDrummer has recently been poring […]