From New York via New Technology and New Scientist comes a report of E-MU systems latest marketing baby – a sampled drum synth. Distribution and price in the UK has yet to be decided but our man Freff wanted to test his computer mailing facilities so here's the first British review transmitted by phone, across the Atlantic in... oh... minutes.

I've wanted about a DOZEN of these, all neatly attached to rototom-style track stands, ever since I first saw them, at the January 1984 NAMM in California. I want them even more now that they are actually into production and popping up in music stores here in the States. (Marketing in England is a little stranger. The E-Drum is a modification of a design by Greg Fitzpatrick of Sweden, and it is his design – in a little box, and with slightly different internal electronics – that is currently being sold in Europe, under the name "D-Drums." That may be changing, as E-Mu ramps up production. Stay tuned for bulletins.)

E-Mu, as you may remember, are those intelligent chaps who developed the Emulator I and now the updated Emulator II with its 17 second sampling time. Using similar technology the E-Drum designers sample a series of percussive effects which can then be played by the E-Drums. The drums are not capable of taking in their own samples – you have to buy those already locked into chips by E-Mu – but the range of available sounds is expanding.

Slap in the appropriate data cartridge and the little box will become anything you could conceivably want.

This is an exciting idea. The whole onset of electronic drumming has been moving in the direction of freeing the drummer to be orchestrator as well as timekeeper, and what the E-Drum does is vastly increase the potential range of timbres and tone-colors at his/her disposal... pianos, gongs, waterfowl, etc.

Right. Now, before I get totally carried away, back to reality. It's a flat little box, painted dark blue, with a flat rubber pad covering just about its entire surface. The whole pad is sensitive, right out to the edges. No dead spots or variations – a good thing – since it's not that large. This is NOT a device for sloppy drummers. It comes with a mounting rack that allows you a fair amount of flexibility in terms of fitting it into your kit. At the front of the unit there are the following controls:

- a pitch knob, for setting the frequency of the sound you're playing.

- an inset trigger sensitivity control, with a range great enough so that you can play an E-Drum with gentle finger-taps or thwacking heavy metal lunges, as you prefer. (Be careful with this setting, though, since if it is set too low your E-Drum might be triggered by stray vibrations from the rest of the kit.)

- two selector buttons that allow you to switch between sounds on a multiple-sound cartridge.

- a pitch sensitivity knob, so you can choose for yourself whether you want to be able to control pitch as well as dynamics, and if so, how much.

- a decay knob, very nearly the most useful feature of the beast in terms of tailoring your sound to fit the needs of the occasion or the tune. If you want your gong sound to really ring out to its maximum value, or want to clip it down to a percussive metalloid snap, this is your ticket.

- two active EQ knobs, bass and treble. Great for making the sound cut through on stage or in studio.

On the back of the box you've got a few other goodies, such as:

- a DC In jack. E-Mu makes adaptors for the appropriate outlet voltages.

- a battery on/off switch. The unit uses two nine-volt batteries when it isn't on AC/DC adaptor power.

- the data cartridge slot.

- a Trigger In stereo jack. This allows you to trigger the E-Drum with another source signal, such as another E-Drum or mic input from a normal drum. In fact, this input allows you to take tremendous advantage of the E-Drum's ability to track dynamics. You could literally re-record an existing drum track by simply running it into this jack and taking the E-Drum's output for the new track. (The other part of the stereo jack gives you an input for any standard voltage control pedal, for controlling pitch, etc.)

- a mono Audio Out jack.

- and a DC Out jack. With this you can gang up to five E-Drums off a single AC/DC adapter.

Sample times vary depending on the sound E-Mu have loaded in. At the moment the average E-Drum cartridge has 64k of EEPROM space but when the sound required uses less than that, you can squeeze up to four percussive effects on one cartridge, and select them by switches on the front of the drum.

Alternatively, for the long sustained noises, there are plans to push the memory space as far as 128k in order to capture the full duration.

From listening and playing, I'd put the quality of the E-Drums at excellent — better than that of the original Emulator keyboard, but maybe not up to the full glory of the forthcoming Emulator II.

Like anything else that's fairly new, the technology outstrips the applications... for now. There are only eight sounds available from E-Mu at the moment: grand piano, snare, electric tom, tympani, rototom, electric snare 1/2, and tom. This is going to change. E-Mu has at least 20 more sound cartridges in the works, and there is talk that a variety of independent suppliers (such as Digidrums, which is creating an entire industry by supplying alternate drum machine sounds) will be producing cartridges as well. Furthermore, as the software increases, so will the hardware. In the relatively near future you can expect E-Drum-specific mixers, sequencers, and possibly even user-sampling (through some other device than the E-Drum itself, of course).

In the meantime, though, it's still incredibly useful, whether you're an electric drummer who would like some natural drum sounds, or vice-versa, or just a demon percussionist waiting to be set free. Here in the States they list price at $389.00 per drum (with one cartridge included in that price), and $59.95 for every extra cartridge.