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IF YOU ARE THINKING OF BENDING A DRUMULATOR IT IS A MAINS POWERED DEVICE
YOU NEED TO KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND WHAT PRECAUTIONS TO TAKE
EVEN WHEN IT'S UNPLUGGED FROM THE MAINS THE CAPACITOR IN THE POWER SUPPLY
CAN GIVE YOU AN ELECTRICAL SHOCK!
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Bent it!
I got two 12-position switches (one of them only has 11 clicks though... WTF but they were second hand)
I didn't want to do a patchbay for safety also - this is a mains powered machine after all think about it - if a wire came off the chips inside it *could* touch the PSU so then there would be 220V on your patchcable? No thanks
They rotaries are wired to 12 pins it's a little lame because now I have combinations like 3+5 and 5+3 which is the same bend of course, but the advantage with the way I wired it is that I only needed to solder to 12 pins of the ROM chip.
Those 12 pins were all the cool connections anyway pin 13 was getting a bit too highpitched pin 14 sparks and crashes the machine !!! Don't short this one!!!
(Drum machine upside down looking at PCB drumpads facing towards you, bottom left pin of ROMs - don't short)
I used the 3d ROM chip from the left (out of 4) The leftmost is not a ROM but an EPROM and has the cymbal sample in it. Better not touch that one either, EPROM will be easier to fry, as I said, the bends on all the chips are pretty much identical they're "stacked".
How does it sound? Before bending it well, while it might have been hot sh*t in 1983 it really lacks in high frequencies, but... that makes it PERFECT for bending which generates harmonics.
It sounds great, really fat!!
Todo: The toms have SSM filter chips (one for hi/med one for Lo tom) the trimmers hardly make a difference so I am going to try and mod it so the cutoff frequency is tweakable. Resonance is not connected I think will try & change that too. My drumulator is v2.0 no MIDI, saw a kit on the Net for $50 MIDI and v3.0 OS only 3 wires to connect.
Will probably get that...