Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The Mighty SpecDrum!

A bit random, but I thought I'd share a special moment with you... One of my myspace friends randomly messaged me this morning saying he'd got his hands on a Specdrum - and all the memories came flooding back. I think I can honestly say the SpecDrum was my first ever experience of Drum programming, or even sequencing. I had a little Spectrum 48K (not the ZX, mine was a bit better) with the SpecDrum adapter plugged in the back, and then the sound connected up to my mum's old wireless radio, a battery powered one with only one speaker! Hah!

I think I was still in primary school at the time (so even younger looking than that last picture) so only about 8 - and used to just sit there making beats. No, literally, JUST beats. The thing had 8 drum sounds that you loaded into the memory off the cassette, and it could only play 3 simultaneously. But it was ace. 
Behold, the mighty SpecDrum!





1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi there john,
yes me too i was an avid user of the excellent specdrum and wrote many a song with it. On another note i thought i would just let you know that there is a version for the pc (not an emulator) actually written for the pc here is some blog.

its on the wikipedia site and a link to it from there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Wadfm


enjoy


Lee B