Clavia DDrum, the original!

If you are a lot into electronic drum sounds, you might have heard about Clavia's own electronic drum modules, the Clavia DDrum series!


To make it clear, I mean the Clavia DDrum series and not the more recent Clavia Nord Drum series.
Despite both these series of machines are aimed at producing drum sounds, the approach they use to get to those sounds is completely different, with the classic Clavia DDrums using samples to produce sounds, while the Clavia Nord Drums uses a more fundamental synth engine, more similar to the classic analog drum modules from Simmons, for instance.

Clavia doesn't own the DDrum brand anymore and it hasn't since 2005, which might be the reason why their new drum modules have a different name (despite as I mentioned, the approach to produce drum sounds is completely different as well).

And unlike the Clavia Nord Drum, these were actually amongst the first products from Clavia!
According to wikipedia, the first product was the Digital Percussion Plate 1, which seems to be the predecessor to the original Clavia DDrum, using the same cards to store drum sounds.

But unlike the Digital Percussion Plate 1, the original Clavia DDrum was a drum module featuring several identical drum channels.
What would make each channel sound different would be the sound card that was inserted in the back!


Despite this is a pretty rare machine, I used to own the one present in the photos I added to this post!

The original Clavia DDrum! 4 sounds available per module plus some basic editing to shape your sounds!

Unfortunately, this was a pretty incomplete set, featuring only 3 drum channels plus the power supply module.
And to make things worse, I only got 2 sound cards with it, meaning I could only use two of the drum channels at the same time...

The back of why unit! There was no mix output, only individual outputs, trigger inputs and a slot for the sound card!

I'm also a bit unsure the case was complete as it seemed pretty fragile, in fact, too fragile for me to dare carrying it in an airplane to bring it to my personal studio...

All these issues made me get rid of it, despite I had a pretty good impression about it!

The sound seemed pretty nice, and despite it had a pretty limited set of parameters available to shape the sound, it could do enough to keep things interesting (and having a dedicated knob for all those functions was nice as well!), even with only 4 sounds available per sound card.

The one thing that was a real shame was that there was no mix output, which could be nice in some situations, but fortunately it featured individual outputs in both jack and XLR form!

Slightly different view on the back! The power supply had a pretty weird connector, by the way, so if you get one, try to get the power supply with it!

All in all, it is a machine I wouldn't mind getting again, but this time I'd like a machine with more drum channels!
So, if someone has one of these with more channels for sale / trade, please let me know cause I would love to do a proper review about it as I really love old electronic drum modules!