The Drumulator people would appear to have maintained a reasonably low profile whilst getting on with the ancient business of drum-machine making. The E-mu systems keyboard set ups have, by and large, taken the limelight away from Drumulator, but of course the advances made with the Emulator relative to sampling and programming have been naturally passed on to their drum machines. This brings us naturally to the Emulator SP-12, this month's test machine.

When Drumulator first came on the scene many potential buyers were a little sceptical about its performance because of its size. However, these people need have no such doubts about SP-12. It's as big as the Linn 9000, which I suppose you could say is roughly the size of a large IBM electric typewriter.

The SP-12's controls are laid out very logically in seven different clearly marked sections. At top left we have Set up, next to that is Cassette/Disk, then Sync and finally Sample. Below these four sections are the controls for Programming and below these are the faders and buttons for Performance. On the very far right is the Master control area. It consists of a 10 key calculator pad and an information window which is actually a 'liquid crystal display'.

The performance section contains the eight faders for the voices; these govern and control volumes for the sounds as well as pitch and decay. Underneath these faders are a further eight square buttons which are 'touch sensitive' and sound 32 different voices. Another smaller button next to them selects any of the four banks available. The top bank is meant to be loaded with voices sampled by the user; we'll talk of this later. The second bank has hi-hats 1, 2 and 3 (closed, half open and open), two different claps, two different ride cymbals and a crash. The third bank has four acoustic and four electronic toms while the bottom bank has two bass drums, four snares (two electric) and finally rim and cowbell. All these sounds were pretty good and with the tuning, volume and decay functions selected via the performance control and sent to the faders, there's an awful lot you can do to ring the changes with the available sounds. (It's a luxury to have control over decay because when you change that parameter you really do come up with different sounds.). The pitch change will also be remembered in record, so you only need to slide the fader whilst programming to achieve glissando (timp-type) effects. The three specific functions I mentioned may also be set up to come up on all eight buttons in multi-level mode. So, volume will go from soft on button 1, to loud on button 8. If you do this with a sampled note (having selected pitch change), then the buttons will take you up a semitone at a time. These buttons are touch sensitive, ie dynamic, although not pressure sensitive so you can't just vary slightly your pressure to change your accent. In common with many of the newer machines SP-12 has a repeat button which is linked directly with the auto correct feature. It will sound any voice in eight notes and triplets, sixteenth notes and triplets, thirty-second notes and triplets and so on. This is quite a time saver and very effective if a gradual pitch change is affected while it's repeating.

All information shows up in your LCD which is ideal for inserting beats in step time. This is because it shows up exactly which instrument is sounding on each beat, eg MS 01, BT 04, 1/16 = beat position and number of beats to the bar, while HH1 and BS1 show bass and hat both playing on the first semi quaver of the bar. Up to four voices will be shown in the LCD on a given beat, but if you've programmed more a plus sign will also show. In Song mode SP-12 will remember up to eight different volume mixes, and store 100 songs and 100 patterns with a capacity of 5000 notes minimum. In the Song mode it works very much like Drumulator except for the fact that it has a Subsong feature which is a memory saver and will repeat a segment (say verse and chorus) anytime you want. Tempo changes may be achieved too and the machine will not only remember them numerically (via LCD), it will also give you info on the tempo you're trying to find. Simply tap the tempo button twice in rhythm and it will tell you exactly what that is in beats per minute. It will measure from 40 up to 240 bpms.

I mentioned those eight 'user' voices. They're designed to store your very own sounds and this feat is accomplished in the same way as on the Emulator. You may sample from any source: compact disc, cassette or microphone, and all you need to do is input the sound, adjust the gain via a rotary pot and watch it rise and fall through the LCD which has become a VU display, and then 'blow' it into the memory which is protected by a battery. We may then truncate the sound to get rid of unwanted voices around the one we're interested in. To achieve this, we look in the window which shows a number relative to the total length of the sound in bytes. Then we may 'prune' our sound both back and front till it's perfect, and work on it by adjusting its decay or perhaps using the built-in 'loop' feature make it much longer (up to 1.2 seconds). That's about it. (A pair of faders help to chop the sound, one is coarse and the other fine.)

The SP-12 has several synchronisation features, for instance it is fitted with MIDI so may be linked with any other system so equipped and can be played externally by pads in real time like SDS9. It also puts out its own SMPTE code which will allow the machine to start from anywhere in a song (once recorded), so you needn't go back to the beginning each time. It will know exactly where it us. It also has the ability to 'read' the vast majority of sync codes put out by various other synthesizers and drum-machines.

At the rear of the wedge-shaped box are various jack inputs and outputs as well as three plugs for MIDI in, out and through. We have sample input, mix out, eight voice outs. Metronome out with its own separate volume control and two other jack sockets for Cass/Sync/SMPTE out and in. Finally we have footswitch sockets for Run/Stop, Step/End repeat and Tap/Auto repeat. These enable you to run the machine from a distance with a degree of tap dancing without using your hands! Finally we have another Din should you wish to load from or dump to Disk.

Everything is simply laid out and SP-12 seems to be easy to use given a little patience. It really is a sophisticated piece of electronic wizardry, and in some ways it's ahead of even the more expensive competition. Its price bridges the gap between the Japanese machines and the Linn 9000, and its sounds are as good, if not better, than most.

For: Sampling, comprehensive info window
Against: Not pressure sensitive.

EMULATOR SP-12 — RRP: £2695