Circuit Bending

Korg DDD-1

The Korg DDD-1 from 1987 used to be one of the leading digital drum machines, and, for the time, offered a load of possibilities for sculpting sound. It had 8 outputs and even sampling was possible with the optional RAM card, although not quite effective. Nowadays this device seems (and sounds) rather silly, making it cheap to get, and, anyhow, it remains a fascinating musical instrument.

This drum machine's sound is typical for the eighties and the open chip architecture makes manipulation easy and enables interesting effects. I built an 8-switch matrix for beautiful noise effects into mine, so far.

Sound example