Building an Analog drum module

I just received everything I need to build my own Analog Drum Module:



Someone managed to convince me that by doing this I will be a even cooler musician, so here I am...digging on resistors, diodes, wires and meaningless boards!



The module is a DS7 Drum Synce (DC860)and the smaller one is a simple Gate To Trigger Converter.

The DS7 Drum Synce (DC860) is a little analog percussion synthesizer from the 80's made by CORON. This drumsynth was dedicaced to drummers : the DS7 was fixed on the border of a drum to be played/triggered by hitting the drum.

The DS7 contain a VCO +VCA chain. The VCO is modulated by a cheesy LFO and a simple decay envelope trigged by the piezzo cell pulse. The cell work as a pressure/hit sensor. It can be replaced by a jack to be used with any kind of trigg pulses or even gates. In this case the "decay" pot become a "Release" pot ... The VCA is directly controled by the envelope. The LFO can drive the VCO from slow modulation to hi-speed to produce FM like sounds.

I needed some new analog raw meat for the distortion chain... let's see how long it takes to build it :)

FerricTDS - Tape Dynamics Simulator VST

I had this FerricTDS VST .DLL sleeping in my plugins folder for a few months now. I did think it was good for whole mixes and never thought it could have any employment in industrial music.

Inspired by the smooth dynamic shaping capabilities of some high-end reel-to-reel tape recorders, this plug-in simulates three of the most distinctive and much appreciated sonic effects generated by these devices:

DYNAMICS
- gently shaping the overall dynamic response
SATURATION
- adding extra harmonic-related content
LIMITING
- controlling peak performance

But a few days ago I accidently watched a presentation video on YouTube and realized it was sounding incredibly good on snare drums:

So I spent the last weekend testing it on them and I was right: the correct sampled snare (mostly from '80 drum machines) processed with the right reverb and fed into this plug-in will produce the classic industrial snare, also the loudest ones from modern EBM.

I am going to test the plug-in on whole mix anyway, as it is said to work very well on enhancing loudness.


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