KORG DDM-110 Super Drums (Japan, 1984) Vintage Drum Machine + Manual & P. Supply

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"The Korg Super Drums DDM-110 is a programmable digital drum machine, a fantastic piece of retro pro audio equipment! It was one of the first digital drum machines to reach the mass market. It’s famous for its distinctive, punchy sound and revels in the simplicity of its programming. What distinguished it as a “digital” drum machine was its use of PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) samples for its instrument sounds. Earlier, analogue drum machines worked by internally synthesising percussive drum-like sounds out of various combinations of sine waves, noise and filters. Digital drum machines, on the other hand, could actually store short digital recordings of proper acoustic drums in ROM, thereby offering far greater potential for realism.


Five dials, one switch, and 15 buttons are mounted on its face, giving the user control of various parameters, including the master volume, the relative volumes of the hi-hat, cymbal and metronome sounds, and the tempo -- which is calibrated to an arbitrary scale with Slow at one extreme and Fast at the other. There is a second dial for fine-tuning tempo and this allows for a little more precision, although not as much as a proper bpm counter. The Record switch enables and disables pattern editing, and the 10 buttons along the bottom represent the nine different instrument sounds: (Bass, Snare, Rim, Hi-tom, Lo-tom, Closed Hi-hat, Cymbal and Claps), with the addition of an Accent button for adding a bit of dynamic variation to your patterns.


The remaining buttons are Shift (which doubles as delete when editing patterns in real time) Start/Stop (which er... starts and stops patterns playing) and Song, Pattern, and Up/Enter which are used to change modes and navigate around the DDM110's LED-illuminated menus.


The side panels are home to a variety of sockets, including a headphone jack, left and right line outputs (the latter offers a mix of the stereo signals when used alone) and a Trig Out socket (which can be used to send a pulse to trigger, for example, the arpeggiator on a synth with a trigger input). There is also an input for the nine-Volt DC mains adapter, two mini-jack sockets for connecting a cassette deck (to back up pattern data) and a five-pin DIN socket labelled Sync (see Sync Or Swim box).


The sampled drum sounds won't win any prizes for authenticity, but are a product of its era - perfect for lo-fi or 80s styled music! Adding a little reverb goes a long way with them. There are slots for 32 patterns which can be combined to form up to 8 songs."