simmons sds9 sample roms.

i ordered an eprom programmer from ebay so i can make sample roms for my simmons sds9 drum brain.
http://simmonsmuseum.com/?area=devices& ... tails&id=6

along with its analog bassdrum and toms, it has 3 sample roms. one for the snare and two for the rimshot(only one rimshot be used at a time.)
the current samples are a bit boring, 80's rock snare and two unremarkable rimshots.

i still have some waiting to do but from what i can gather i just need to burn 8bit mono samples onto 128k rom chips and i'm golden. the sds9 dosen't have a sample rate as such. its just one of the parameters. so i just have to try a few rates and see what works best.

any suggestions as to what samples to put on the roms?

i'm thinking of starting with an 808 clap and cowbell. (fairly unadventurous i know)

Nice project. you need help? It would be nice to see stuff that never was meant to go in there like vinyl drum samples.

well with the burner.. it might be cool to try a bunch of stuff out.. how about if you did what DM suggested with the vinyl samples.. maybe you can get a little ghost note type of snare along with a regular snare from within a break (probably easy to find a good one) and see how that fits with the rim/snare cutoff.

or **** it, impeach the president because that kick drum would be fun over the regular kick...

i found the manual for the original simmons eprom burner, actually its only 16k sample roms! so thats 1 second at 16khz or 2 seconds at 8khz. its been such a long time since i actually had to worry about the nyquist limit.

luckily simmons eproms are just raw unsigned 8bit samples. not the like the oberheim dmx, or linn lm1 which use some kind of encoding.


dustymaestro: you got some tricks to share?

mr_debauch: Impeach the President kick. good call!

i already though about putting an amen snare in it. and maybe some james brown grunts.

I do have some tricks to share, like what?

I have some services also and some sounds. Some nice outboard, lets do this! I have a S 950 to archive to if you like, 4000 in the picture to.

it works!

i got my "minipro tl866 usb eprom burner" in the post yesterday (about 40€ on ebay)
and my UV eprom eraser.

but i didn't have any eproms, so i went to the fleamarket with my chip puller and spent all day looking at broken electronics and old bits of computer, untill i finally found a modem with a 27512 eprom.

the 27512 eprom has the same pinout as the original 27128 eprom, but has two extra address pins. checked out the datasheets to be sure.

i just took the first sample i found, a james brown "huh" and cut it down to 13684 samples and exported it as an unsigned 8bit sample.

the 27512 eprom is 65536 words long so i just made a sample with 4 copies of the sample(i could make a daughterboard with switches to toggle the extra adress pins and store 4 samples on one chip....maybe later)

after trying to pull out the rimA chip and sending it flying across the room, i found a couple of ZIF sockets in my parts box (ZIF stands for Zero Insertion Force, its a special kind of ic socket that lets you easily change chips without bending the pins)

it totally Just Works! the sds9 has a nice Curtis analog filter chip.

on my first try the sample was a bit quiet, next time i'll try compressing the hell out of the sample.
and i think i have to do something with the sample rate too, it doesn't sound right . but i had just directly exported a 16bit sample without thinking.
i think the proper same rate should be 16000hz

the problem i have now is that it takes 22 minutes to erase an eprom, so with only one eprom chip i've got a bit of a wait between tries!

the second try with an 808 clap is sounding great!!! i need more eproms!

dustymaestro: if you want to send me some Samples i'd be glad to Stick them onto roms, sample at a load of different settings them with my S1000 and send them back to you.

this whole Rom sample trip is driving me crazy! i've started looking at used alesis HR16 drum machines too...

dope! one guy on here has a drumulator with linn sounds in it.

Mr Debauch , you need to get it on this.

Motosega, I'm going to send you some sounds. I already started putting some sounds together. Its also a good reason to finally take the Simmons Clap Trap I recorded to cassette and get them going.

Do you guys want me to record stuff to cassette?

i've been playing with the eprom burner these last few days, its a total nerdgasm.

files should be 8bit unsigned raw and should be exactly 8192 samples long for and 8k rom and 16384 samples long for a 16k rom
the sample rate is controlled by a knob on the sds, the max sample rate possible is a little bit more than 44.1khz. i can export a 44.1khz wav as raw unsigned pcm and with the sample rate knob tuned nearly all the way up it sounds pretty much like it does at 44.1khz. samples converted to lower sample rates can be pitched up more.

i also did a bit of research and oberheim DMX /DX/Linn etc roms are also possible, the only thing i need to do is export as raw 8bit ulaw audio instead of unsigned pcm. so if anybody has one of these and want some roms burned then i can help out!

so far i'm just using wav files i have on my computer, but i might try sampling onto my ensoniq mirage then dumping the samples via midi. recording into the mirage will probably sound better because its actually designed to capture in 8bit.

so, dusty, and everyone else, if you have some samples to send me i can burn them onto eproms reccord them into the S1000 with varios settings and send you the resulting wavs!