No, not too hard.
The info is in the Prommer service manual.
There is a whole section that tells you what each link and resistor is for, as I recall.
It's not complex, but it's not simple either.
The exact interval between the pitch variation option isn't directly available, like you would hope, but I put small preset trimmers, like you get in professional tape machines, into the positions that had resistors marked on the board in the relevant places and could make some interesting things happen.
If you start with a Tom card, (there is a 2 digit code that says what the card was factory wired to do.
I can remember 23 was one, but not all of the options appeared, 1 to 23) then it was wired to be one sample, played at three pitches, coded from the three buttons.
The overall pitch, on the original tuning edgewise pot, and then the first interval down, then the one down FROM THAT, those are your choices.
Setting the middle one would only be as result of your other earlier choices, if that makes sense.
Electronic logic isn't easily described in conversation, not by me anyway.
If you can find the manual and can read the diagram, or get someone to talk you through it, you'd see.
Most noises don't sound that realistic over a large range, although I think some of the DMX and Linn toms were very flexible if you wanted odd sounds.
There is a setting for the decay envelope to the pitch, on a flying resistor I think, which makes the toms droop as they fade, a very good effect.
I got a set of schematics before the Prommer manual was published, probably before the Prommer was available, and photocopied the voice card schematics, tippexed out the jumpers etc, then went through all the cards and marked up the diagrams to show what was available to me.
The other card wirings gave a variety of options, which sounded promising.
I then tried experimenting and got some good results, then got lost, and never really got any further until the Prommer arrived.
The Electrongate Maestro is your man, he definitely stayed the course I flunked.
His site had much more sensible illustrations of how it worked than any other I saw.
I still have the paperwork here for the commercially available cards, though most of my original cards are at a distance I could look them out later.
I was looking the other day for the Xpander manual, as I sold that last week, so I do know where the Oberheim paperwork is at least,
even if I don't know where the time went.
I think I ended up keeping custom things like 2 snare sounds with two pitches available on two of the buttons, and maybe two cowbell pitches of one sample on the top two buttons and a different cowbell on the bottom button, but it took weeks of staying up late after work, there were lots of non-productive possibilities to explore first.
It's not a recommended path to pursue I'd say. The cards are very robustly manufactured and didn't fall apart under pressure of work, like I eventually did.
I had an idea, as I was working for a Studio Equipment hire company, that I could rent the resulting custom drum equipment to some famous producer, but even though I did meet the right people, it never happens how you would like, so I just made some custom chips for them, then Atari/akai samplers arrived and I didn't go there with everybody else.
In 1983 I was most interested in trying to play the parts in from Simmons pads, as I got bored with the programming p
rocess.
That took quite a while, actually not working very well until MIDI arrived, and of course velocity and better playing surfaces and all the other advances we take for granted today.
I used real 8inch drum heads with wooden rims over a few layers of thin foam, with triggers on the rim, and another on the wooden base on real drumstands, which is pretty much the only way, apart from all the wood. I didn't try the foam cone they have now, but the triggers work very easily, it's not rocket science.
Mesh heads were sort of there, but I never thought of using them, there were other issues like cross-triggering, all solved now and quite cheap.
I put them into a real drumkit too, on foam in the snare and toms , and glued to the head for the kick.
It just worked first time except for a foamed pad in the kick, which was hopeless.
All we had at the time for sounds were the Simmons SDSV or the drum machines once MIDI arrived properly a year or so later.
The fixed velocity voice cards obviously didn't work that realistically, despite the glib mention in the manual.
I did a movie soundtrack session with Jerry Goldsmith where the drummer played a MIDI DMX from the later rubbery Simmons Pads and it worked great.
Everything worked great, they were all top class musos and techs and money flowed like wine, as the lyric goes.
A big Orchestra often makes things well.
Actually the Prommer ad was very misleading too, it made it seem like you would own a Synclavier equivalent. for $700.
Well maybe it was just as well anyway that that didn't happen.
From:
Nick Zampiello <newallianceeast@...>
To:
"oberheim@yahoogroups.com" <oberheim@yahoogroups.com>; "pjwhite@..." <pjwhite@...>
Sent:
Friday, 27 January 2012, 1:56
Subject:
Re: [oberheim] Re: DMX voice cards and chips soon come
while we are on DX/DMX stuffs,
how do i expand the tuning ratio from pad one to pad three on the toms for instance
i would love a 5th or 6th from top tom to bottom but the cards aren't doing that as they are...
it would ne cool to be able to tune the middle point to but i'm sure that is way stretching the tech!!!
:-D
Z
NEW ALLIANCE EAST!!!!
--------------------------------------
http://www.newallianceeast.com
http://www.newallianceaudio.com
http://www.myspace.com/newallianceaudio
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www.myspace.com/thecampaignforrealtime
From:
Axel Brümmer <lz303@...>
To:
oberheim@yahoogroups.com
Sent:
Thursday, January 26, 2012 8:41 PM
Subject:
Re: [oberheim] Re: DMX voice cards and chips soon come
Thanks for your post...just need a single 1554 card. Believe me ...i tried nearly every combination on my 1675 card. The card does exactly what i configure but the sound is like through a telephone
!
Maybe some faulty parts
Don't know and to be honest i don't care anymore.
So in the the end i chose to search for a simple 1554 card for the Tamb/Rim sounds. I know from electrongate how to configure the card.
I am able to burn the eproms myself (i have quite a lot of 2732s lying around).
3 other cards in my DMX are the bigger cards (1675) and they work the way they should but this card sounds strange...
So please tell me what you need for a single 1554 card without eprom ...
Thanks in advance...
--- On
Fri, 27/1/12, Les Lambert
<les_lmbrt@...>
wrote:
From: Les Lambert <les_lmbrt@...>
Subject: [oberheim] Re: DMX voice cards and chips soon come
To: "oberheim@yahoogroups.com" <oberheim@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Friday, 27 January, 2012, 2:29
I definitely have multiple Perc2 boards, probably the chips too, but read on for fuller exploration.
I have spare cards, but not in my room with me, so no quick fix.
Which attributes do you guys want, is it a 4K or an 8K card or a cymbal
The 1554 is only the pcb number and the chip fitted gets replayed according to the jumper settings and a few diodes and resistors and occasionally a capacitor.
some odd results happen if you just move chips around, not that exciting at the time, before circuits got bent for fun and profit.
I have a case full of these and the chip library I made in the 80s, and am planning on checking through it soon.
I had 7 DMXs at one time ( 9 if you count the first two that got stolen), and kept all the spare cards as I sold them off. Who knows why
Anyway time approaching for a sell-off.
I made custom chips for a few people and lots for my own amusement, just as MIDI was arriving.
Probably pointless now, but I started with the DMX and LM1 sounds and collected anything I could lay my hands on and copied and merged and eq'd and aphex'd
Some of them sounded better after they'd been through the Pro Walkman with Dolby C I thought.
The 80s was very bright , all that SSL, Jason and Kylie, Scritti Politti etc
I'm in London in the UK, cards are in Northern Scotland, but a visit is planned as soon as the icicles melt.
I won't know if the chips are still good until I get the DMX and the cards together again.
The cards are very reliable, as are the factory chips, but a lot of my custom ones failed I think due to incomplete erasure.
I never had a way of computer backup for these back then, but the Prommer would make copies into its memory and you could join lots of EPROM contents together in a chain and put them in a bigger EPROM if you could afford it, as a backup.
No machine would play it obviously, apart from the Prommer.
You have to program a chip to see if it sounds right, the Prommer preview doesn't come close enough.
So I got lots of not-quite what I thought I should have got, then erased them for 30mins and tried again. We had it tough in them days lad.
The DMX is here but suffering switch fatigue, but may be done soon, I mentioned it to the man today while I was visiting my derelict 80s gear at the menders.
Keep me posted with your voice card requirements, I'm not selling the DMX or Prommer, but I have 20 something cards and now only 1 DMX, and the need for interchangeable sounds is served much better now as we know.
Of course I would need to get a reasonable price for them, this stuff is my pension (apparently). Who'd have thought
I can't personally do BIN files, although that's actually easier, as long as you have the chip.
Assuming the prommer still works I could make copies of the sounds I own, but the EPROMs aren't readily available I'd guess.
You'd need single 2732A for the old sounds, single or multiple 2764A for the longer, newer ones.
I fitted a few cards with zif sockets, but there's more to it than that.
Lots of combination of wiring on the cards have to be dealt with. and sample rate choices makes some combinations hard to do
Most EPROMs of these two types worked on the Prommer if they hadn't been blown up.
I have a more recent eraser now, the lamps get dim,which was probably what I'd failed to consider back then.
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