Simmons like

For me, the 1980s were these things:

•    The full colors of the rainbow

•    Motorcycles

•    Yamaha DX7

and

•    Simmons SDSV drums  !!!!

Of course, these are just the things from back then, that I felt the most..

So,  since I am a little obsessive with stuff, I made an effort to emulate the Simmons drums’ sound, you know : those piou-piou / pow-pow toms , the diz-diz snare and the ultra punchy noisy (or not)  kick !

Since there are thousands of free samples out there of the various Simmons drum modules, I tried a somehow different approach : to synthesize those sounds myself..

Do you remember the free STOMPER drumsynth, a while back? It was (and still is) one of the most versatile FREE drumsynths ever. You can make ANY drum sound and noise stuff you could imagine, from TRX0X sounds to (ahem) Simmons, and more. I personally think that even accidentally you may come up with a zillion different sounds, drums or strange stuff, possibilities are endless!

So, a lazy afternoon I got  into my TimeMachine and went back to my childhood, around 1984, I guess,..   So much music, so much feeling, so much freedom … there were no mobile phones, no internet, no computer screens, just living inside the music !!

aaaaaHH!!!.......................

….So, when I transferred myself back again into todays time, the year 2020, i decided to use this softsynth from the future: the Stomper Hyperion 5.01 !   

After a few hours of fiddling with it, I managed to create some sounds that I liked, so then I threw the result  into Kontakt, and so : the “XIMMONS” drumkit arised !! I called it “The Stomped Simmonz drumkit” .

It is not, by a long shot, an emulation of the SDSV drum synthesizer, but I dig the piou-piou toms I made, and I added also some noise to make the sound more “simmonslike” !!

 

I used 2 kiks, 2 snares and 2 sets of toms, and also some cymbals to make it complete. I added some basic controls for pitch tuning and a basic EG (attack & decay) so that sounds can be altered to some extent. Also a couple of extra sounds were added , one claps sound and a TSIOU (!!) noise !!..

The interface with the controls was created using a free tool made by Will Bedford, It is called KONSTRUKTOR and can be downloaded for free from http://willbedfordmusic.com/konstruktor.html.

The graphics background is an original Simmons SDS, edited somehow, and for royalty reasons, i ... rebranded it, and now it is called "XIMMONS" !!!

Here’s how it looks like :

You can download the Kontakt instrument  for free    here     or    here    or    here

I also included a .pdf that shows  the keyboard mapping of the samples that correspond to the controls of the Kontakt GUI .

Hope you can have fun with it!

synthnitz

May 2020 

 CREDITS :

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/main.html   -   Zapp’s site

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/stomper/index2.html    -   Stomper (by Zapp)

 

Download zapp’s Stomper  >  here

http://willbedfordmusic.com/konstruktor.html  -  Free GUI maker for Kontakt