Producers: Cheetah Marketing
Authors: P Henning and A Pateman

Hooray! After a much intrigue involving distributors, as well as marketing and PR type people, CRASH finally gets to look at the SpecDrum. Nothing unfriendly, you understand, it just took a while to get hold of a review unit. By now quite a few copies of this musical package will have been sold, but if you haven't yet rushed out to buy SpecDrum, read on....

SpecDrum is a bolt-on package that gives you a kit of drums. Not your usual naff drum noises, but real drums sampled onto a chip. Very briefly this means that the sound made by each drum is stored digitally. When the unit is fired up it makes sounds which are just like the real thing - well, nearly. More to the point, most records use some form of digital drum nowadays, and so the sounds produced with SpecDrum are familiar and really great to work with. On a technical note it can record any sort of time signature and beat known to western civilization.

The hardware is contained in the usual matt black box with a phono lead attached. The latter can be plugged into an audio amplifier, a mixer, a recorder or even a megawatt PA system depending on the proximity of your nearest and dearest. Within this box are the chips which produce the drum sounds. The accompanying program allows the Spectrum to fire the drums at your command and fashion the timing into any complex arrangement, depending only on your inventive ability.

SpecDrum comes with a standard kit: Bass Drum, Snare Drum, Mid and Low Tom Toms, Cowbell, Hi Hat open and closed and Hand Claps, although there is no side or crash cymbal which is a little sad. The sound quality of all these is excellent; having used them on my own tapes which have been played to long-suffering colleagues, the verdict was pretty unanimous - for less than £30 it is an absolute giveaway, considering that a drum machine will set you back around £250 and is not half so friendly to use. What's more you can load up different drum sounds, programmed on the other side of the cassette, and have a different kit, and new tapes are planned - a Latin kit is already available. The unit comes complete with a clear and comprehensive guide book.

TO WORK TO WORK...

In outline what you do is write a drum pattern, let's say of two bars length. You can either do this by tapping in each drum/key in turn to a fixed metronome beat (realtime) or by writing direct onto a graphic display (steptime). A little bit of forethought is needed here as you will need to decide how many drum strokes you need for each musical beat. (You can divide each beat into 32 strokes if you're that barmy!).

The program initially defaults to a fixed tempo, but this is easily altered either by numeric input or more simply by pressing L or ENTER while your pattern is playing back. Any change of tempo is noted and stored away. Regardless of how you have created the pattern, you can see it graphically. The edit option gives you complete control to add or take away whatever drumbeats you like, but if that is too difficult, go back to the realtime page and delete or add the drum you want as it plays. A really useful feature of the realtime writing option is that the micro compensates for your lack of accuracy, and shoves the tapped-in drumbeat to the nearest division of a beat.

You can file your short drum pattern away. Songs rarely consist of the same drumbeat all the way through: the most bovine of skin-bashers likes a variation every now and again. Answer: create another pattern. And then another. When you have a compendium of short patterns duly filed and numbered it's time to assemble them into a song format.

The Song Edit page allows the patterns to be edited into a sequence, with individual patterns repeated and placed into whatever order you see fit. The whole format (now called a Song) is given a name and can be dumped onto cassette and recalled later. A song could consist of 255 entries, each one of which may be looped 255 times - enough for several hours of endless drumming. The program can store up to 16 songs at one go which is more than enough for the most ambitious rhythm merchant.

Although it has eight drum sounds, SpecDrum can only cope with three channels, meaning that some drums cannot be produced simultaneously. But this limitation has been catered for, and presents no real problem. The update cassette has a chain editor on it. With this you can reverse the sound of any drum - Simon Goodwin has more information in this issue's TECH TIPS.

I would have liked to have seen a volume and accent option so that some beats could be sounded louder than others, but for the real whizz kids the units offers a synchro pulse input/output. If you're recording onto a multi-track machine a sync pulse is put onto one track. You then record each drum on a separate track, using the recorded sync pulse as a master clock for the program. You are then free to alter the sound of each drum individually and boost or cut the volume at will. In operation I found the SpecDrum's noise level quite acceptable.

To sum up, this is a major achievement for a ridiculously low price. SpecDrum is very easy to use and the sounds are certainly good studio quality. Even if you can't play drums but are keen to add a bit of solid beat to your musical instrument at home, then this is your wisest choice, and it would be a good idea to set up a number of patterns for quick use. If you have a relative with a keyboard that has one of those horrid drum boxes you could do a little cost sharing - Relative gets a far superior drum sound, you get the fun of programming them up and the use of the SpecDrum to help you become a megastar.

If you do end up rich and famous, please remember where you first heard about it - all donations gratefully accepted and quickly spent.

YOU CAN'T BEAT IT!

What's got long greasy hair, makes nasty smells in the corner and creates one hell of a din laying into his kit? A drummer, that's what! Now Rachael Smith reckons she's found a more refined alternative - Cheetah's SpecDrum.

FAX BOX
Name: SpecDrum
Supplier: Cheetah
Price: £29.95

Drummers are a real pain for a new band. When you're starting out you can never find one - and if you make it big they're always the ones who drive the sports cars into the swimming pool! Well, SpecDrum may prove the answer. For thirty quid you get a complete drum kit in the shape of a small box to clip to your Speccy's behind, plus a tape.

The hardware contains the electronic wizardry that gives you three channels of percussion. And as nobody in his right mind would want all that mayhem beeping through the inbuilt speaker, you'll just have to connect it to a hi-fi or other amp via the attached phone, possibly using an adaptor.

Mind you, the really clever stuff is on the tape. Here you'll find your kit of eight digitally sampled sounds. You can use any three of them simultaneously - within certain limitations. SpecDrum comes with a standard rock kit, plus high tom or rim substitutes. The versatility doesn't stop at that - there's even the promise of further kits to come, such as a latin one.

But back to the present. Once you've listened to the eleven examples you'll be dying to create your own tracks, building with rhythmic blocks, creating your patterns then linking an looping them into completed songs. And as the instructions are probably the worst part of the package you can take a look at how this process works here.

There's a lot of memory for storing your tracks. You'll soon find that using the system becomes second nature to you. But the impressive feature is that quality of the sound - it'd easily do for demo tapes. That's why there's a synchro facility - I reckon a full MIDI interface would've proved far too costly. As it is, SpcDrum is unbelievably cheap and great fun to use. A definite hit.

(Simon N Goodwin owns the copyright to this review. Please visit http://simon.mooli.org.uk to find original articles and updates, much new material and his contact details.)

Simon N Goodwin finds another fine disk interface in MGT's Plus D and gets rhythm with the SpecDrum System Two.

Cheetah's SpecDrum package is one of the most versatile and successful add-ons you can get for the Spectrum, as more than 40,000 users have already discovered. Two years after the launch of the product it is still selling, and Cheetah has just released an add-on package, unimaginatively called the SpecDrum System Two, for owners of the original device.

The SpecDrum produces very authentic drum and rhythm sounds by replaying samples - large tables of numbers that describe sound waves - through a black box that plugs into the back of any Spectrum.

The principle is similar to that used in a compact-disc player, and though the SpecDrum isn't as accurate as a CD machine it's still a very convincing way to replay short percussive sounds under computer control. SpecDrum sounds have been heard on TV and radio programs, and even in adverts.

The basic SpecDrum costs £30 and consists of an interface to fit on the back of the computer, with a trailing phono lead to convey sounds to an amplifier. The cassette software lets you play around with a 'kit' of up to eight short sounds at a time; the sounds are arranged in three groups, and you can play any one sound from a group at anytime.

If you use sounds from several groups at once the SpecDrum automatically mixes the sounds together. Most other devices - notably the RAM Music Machine - play short snatches of each sound in turn, giving a less convincing effect.

The original SpecDrum software lets you string together drum patterns on the screen and replay them at any tempo. Alternatively, you can enter the rhythm for each drum individually, by tapping a computer key as the rest of the pattern plays.

The System Two will suit real drummers better as it lets you control all eight sounds directly from adjacent keys on the keyboard.

SOUND CONTROL

The main advantage of System Two over the original SpecDrum is that it allows more control over the drum sounds. You can tune them up and down in pitch by up to two octaves - the equivalent of a range of 49 notes on a piano. You can also play them backwards, or look at the graph of the sound and adjust the volume of the whole or any part. Thus you can make your own drum sounds subtle, distinctive or (with a bit of effort) both!

At first you can only edit and replay the eight sounds that are digitally recorded on the other side of the tape. The supplied samples include bass and snare drum sounds, electric and acoustic tom-toms, open and closed high hat cymbals, handclaps and a clave.

These raw recording use the maximum dynamic range of the system, so they can be tuned and edited with very little deterioration in quality. You can then assemble the sounds into kits that can be used with the standard SpecDrum program, mixing in original sounds if you wish.

FREE SAMPLES

To get best results from the System Two you need Cheetah's sound sampler - a £45 gizmo that lets you record your own sounds in the computer memory.

Much of the SpecDrum System Two software is devoted to sampling. The principle is the same as that for the Cheetah sound-sampler program, reviewed in CRASH last year, but System Two improves upon some of its best features and those of the RAM Music Machine software.

The main difficulty in recording good drum sounds at home is that the SpecDrum can only cope with very short noises; the longest sound it can handle is only about a sixth of a second. The System Two Sampler has the same restriction, and doesn't let you edit the desired part out of a longer recording, so it can take quite few tries to record a sound without losing the start or the end. Another display option, VIEW, shows you a solid graph of the whole recording till you release the V key.

The restricted sample length means that you can fit the program, a kit of eight sounds, and the drum pattern or sample being edited into 48K. Unlike the sound sampler's own software, but like the RAM Music Machine and the first SpecDrum program, System Two ignore the extra memory on a Spectrum 128.

It takes about 20 seconds to load or save a sample on cassette, and two minutes to save a complete kit of eight drums. Microdrive filing is supported, and I had no trouble loading and saving samples on the Swift Disk using Sixword's microdrive emulator; files loaded and saved in a few seconds, regardless of size. The program is supplied as a headerless tape file, so it is not easy to transfer it to disk without a magic-button device like a Multiface.

WAVE EDITING

The System Two wave editor displays the detailed graph of a sample, spread over 12 display pages, with one dot representing the level of each individual sample. A recording is made up of 3072 separate sampled levels. You can move about in steps of half a page very quickly, and can position a cursor at any point on the wave.

You can edit the sample the hard way, by movinjg each dot on the graph. If you just want to adjust the level of all or part of a sample you can draw a line or ENVELOPE. The volume is automatically adjusted, throughout the sample, to correspond to the shape of the line.

TUNE lets you shift the pitch of the sample up or down by a semitone, over a range of plus or minus two octaves.

Reducing the pitch of a wave makes it longer; the extra information is lost.

The ENVELOPE and TUNE options degrade the quality of the recording slightly, but they're still useful.

REVERSE turns the sample around so that it plays backwards. The CLIP option just cuts off troughs and peaks outside certain boundaries, generally causing distortion.

If you don't like the result of a change you can UNDO it to recover the previous sound. N and O play the 'new' and 'old' versions, so you can easily compare the sounds before and after editing.

LIMITATIONS

In the last couple of years much space in this column has been devoted to editing and converting the sounds supplied with the original SpecDrum and Cheetah's follow-up cassette kits of prerecorded sounds.

The System Two lets you change the pitch of those sounds, but it will only let you adjust the volume of homemade samples and the eight sounds supplied with System Two.

Cheetah justifies this in the grounds that the kit sounds have already been balanced and attempts to change their volume may ;ead to extra noise or distortion.

THE VERDICT

The SpecDrum System Two works well and will be useful to keen SpecDrummers, but it is a shame that it has limitations that reduce the scope for experimentation (I hope to remove these in future CRASHes).

Still, it's a two-year old product, and the fact that it can be extended at all is a tribute to the original design.

If you already own the Cheetah sound sampler, the SpecDrum System Two is excellent value, and provides a much slicker link between the sampler and the SpecDrum than I have been able to serailise in these pages. But don't expect me to stop now, just when things are getting interesting...