Simmons SDS9
Five hexagonal pads, four distinct snare types, and the brain that finally made electronic drums feel like drums.
Overview
The SDS9 brain is the piece that matters, and it's worth understanding what Simmons built into it before talking about pads. According to Recording Engineer (June 1985, p.149), the module carried an on-board digital delay programmable for slapback or long repeat echo, a fully assignable MIDI interface capable of triggering voices on other synths from the drum pads, and an Auto Trigger function that let players program patterns without striking the pads at all — each program change could be auditioned as it was made. That Auto Trigger detail sounds minor until you've spent an evening programming a drum brain one pad strike at a time; it's the sort of feature that reveals a designer who actually used the thing.
The kit itself runs five drums — bass, snare and three toms — and the pads were a genuine development effort. Simmons reportedly sank £100,000 into their design, which uses floating heads, a special rubber covering and piston-loading. The snare pad carries a rim trigger, and it's there for a specific reason: the SDS9's snare section holds three independent yet related samples — a snare hit, a cross stick and a rim shot — with the rim sample fired by that second trigger. Studio Sound (December 1985, p.42) noted the newly developed injection-moulded pads and counted 20 factory-programmed kit memories alongside a further 20 user-programmable slots. Forty kits in a brain of this vintage is a serious amount of room, and it's the reason the SDS9 stayed in hire fleets and studio racks long after flashier modules came and went.
Sound generation splits three ways, and the split tells you exactly what Simmons trusted. The bass drum is digitally synthesised via software programming inside the control unit. The snare sounds are samples of real drums encoded onto a chip, replayed on trigger. The tom-toms are pure analogue circuitry — and that's deliberate, not a cost shortcut. Simmons, like most manufacturers at the time, had yet to find a way of producing consistently better tom results digitally, so they stuck with what they knew. It's an honest admission baked into the hardware, and it's why the SDS9's toms have that recognisable Simmons character that the sampled snares don't quite share.
The snare section is where the SDS9 earns its reputation. Four basic snare types — tight, rock, huge ambient and electric — each with pitch, bend and decay controls, multiply out into a startling range of usable sounds. The bass drum is simpler: pitch and click level only, and it's hard to move far from the solid, workmanlike punch of the basic sound unless the click component is stripped out entirely, at which point definition drops away and you're left with something that sounds like a 1969 recording. The toms reward a watchful hand on the decay control; dialled back, they turn considerably more natural, and unless reviving the early-'80s disco boom single-handedly is the goal, that's where most players land.
A Copy Tom function lets the sound of one tom be instantly copied onto the others at descending pitches — a genuine godsend during programming, and a feature that didn't survive into the later SDS1000. The SDS9 also carries a full complement of outputs, with individual channel outs retained rather than collapsed into a single stereo pair. That's the difference between a kit you can mix properly in a studio and one you can't, and Simmons got it right here.
Pricing at launch was not casual. Recording Engineer (June 1985, p.149) put the suggested list at under $1,850.
The SDS9 occupies an odd spot in the Simmons line. It was the complex, feature-dense machine that the later SDS1000 was explicitly stripped down from — the 1000 kept the same sound-generation architecture, the same three-way split between digital bass, sampled snare and analogue toms, but shed features in the name of approachability. Contemporary writing described the SDS9's facilities as enough to stun a player into submission, and the 1000 as an exercise in confident simplicity by comparison. That's not a knock on the SDS9; it's an acknowledgment that this is the deep end of the range, and the deep end is where the programming payoff lives.
For anyone buying now, the practical picture is straightforward. The brain is the component that matters and the one that shows up for sale on its own, often paired with a couple of pads or a trigger set rather than a full kit. The pads are sturdy enough that Simmons' own confidence in them was well placed, and their interchangeability — with the exception of the bass — means a working kit can be assembled from parts without too much agony. The rim trigger on the snare is the one piece of the pad design that can't be substituted from another position, so a dead snare pad is the one to worry about. Forty kit memories, assignable MIDI, an on-board delay and four genuinely distinct snare types in a box from 1985 is a lot of instrument for the money, and the analogue toms still do the one thing Simmons toms have always done better than anyone expected.
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