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via
this listing
This one was spotted and sent in via
M Me.
"Are you looking for something a bit more special to exhibit in your studio space?
For sale is a unique, ultra rare analogue Drum Machine from the late 1970's.
I got it from an elderly gentlemen who worked for the BBC as an electronic engineer in the early 1980’s.
Everything as far as I can tell seems to be working including all of the red LEDs.
It recently had been converted from a much older round bacalite power connector in the back to an IEC standard connector.
I have no way of testing the multi-pin connectors on the back, which have been installed st the time to connect the machine with multicore looms!
It has eight trigger inputs and eight separate line outputs on XLRs and also a stereo monitor output on a DIN plug (I will supply the DIN plug adaptor)....
This drum synthesiser looks like it could have been a custom built drum machine for Kraftwerk's own KlingKlang recording studio! ;-)
It is actually a drum synthesiser with eight seperate instruments and controls for the instruments like a more modern drum synthesiser not unlike like a Vermona DRM for example, but obviously in a much larger console shaped enclosure.
This is from the earlier days of electronic music where some engineer tried to combine the preset beat-boxes of the time with eight oscillators, that have basic sawtooth, sinus and triangle waveforms and with white noise generators that were triggered by those preset rhythms or via the trigger inputs in the back. Various rhythm presets which were common at the time and some permutations are selectable. Also several presets can be selected at the same time which make a lot of variations possible.
You can get some basic beat box sounds like many other drum machines from the 60's and 70's, but also disco toms (Ring My Bell) if you tune the oscillators. The oscillators go up into the sonic spectrum so you get some very robotic sounds out of the machine too, but settings need to be selected carefully and with some patience.
LFO, VCO and Noise generators can be individually switched on and off per channel.
I would say that the oscillators and the options remind me a little bit of something like let's say the options of what a Coron DS drum synthesiser from the mid 80's had to offer.
A real focal point in ANY studio setup!
This is piece of memorabilia from a bygone area of early electronic pioneers like Kraftwerk, Cluster, Harmonia, Ashra, Popul Vul, etc.
Cosmetically speaking the drum synthesiser is in excellent condition and hasn’t been moved around much and it shows.
The fourth photo shows the drum synthesiser without any of the knobs.
The dimensions are 55x 47x x29cm and it's about 20kg, so pretty heavy....
Here is a link to a quick sound sample of the RME drum machine that I recorded this afternoon. No EQ or compression was used. [
Soundcloud here]
This sound sample is taken from the stereo monitor output section which splits instruments 1-4 to the left side and instruments 5-8 to the right side."
