Chris Cross of Ultravox's Sequential Drumtraks drum machine

video upload by sighkid

"Was lucky to buy this Sequential Drumtraks formerly belonging to the late, great Chris Cross of Ultravox at an auction of his personal artefacts last year. I feel very privileged to own it as you can imagine! Was pleased to see that the batteries had held up and it had a few songs still stored in it. I wasn't able to match any of them to specific Ultravox songs, but then again I'm not the best person to be trying to identify a song just from an isolated drum pattern. Anyway here's a sample song that was on it for those curious :)

NB A couple of points to note:

one of the cooler features of the Drumtraks is that the sounds for each instrument are stored as rom chips that can be swapped in / out. And indeed this unit came with some spare chips. But this does mean that the chips fitted currently may not be the ones originally intended to use with a particular stored pattern.

in theory the Drumtrax can store a specific tempo as part of a song, however most of the ones stored now are set to 136bpm. It seems an unlikely coincidence that that was the intended tempo for all of them, so possibly the idea is that they would have been synced to a master clock elsewhere or have the tempo manually set at playback. Either way I'm not convinced that the tempo here is necessarily the intended one."