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Dave Simmons with his original design drawings
of that was funded from the visual aspect of the original SDS5. And visual aspect was tied inextricably to that sound. The sound you can still hear at the beginning of East Enders (a TV soap in the UK), and once that sound and that image went out of fashion, no-one wanted them anymore, no matter what technology, the passage of time and some clever R&D had produced. Simmons was dead because once it was fashionable and suddenly it was very uncool. Meanwhile, the guy in charge still believed that the next thing coming out of R&D would change people’s minds if it was good enough. So all the money was ploughed into keeping the dream alive, come what may. The SDX was way ahead of its time, but its scope was misunderstood (it’s just a very expensive electronic drum kit, right?) and the technology was not ready for it. It had 2 Mb (not Gb!) of 16 bit RAM and you could have a 20meg hard drive. And that was the biggest we could get, and it cost a fortune. The SDX was a Fairlight for drummers, and it cost about £5,000 at a time the Fairlight was selling for £32,000. Yes, it was an expensive drum kit, but a cheap Fairlight. But most drummers wanted to go dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga, and not many were interested in having 24 semitones spread radially across a drum pad, or to go and carefully sample a snare drum nine times. The instrument was phenomenal, and that in itself was a triumph for the guys at Simmons that dreamt it up and made it real. We sold about 250 and made about £1million loss on it. And I don’t regret doing it. digitalDRUMMER, MAY 2011
It’s only recently that anything has come anywhere near it. dD: Looking back, what would you have done differently? For example, would it have made sense to try and sell your idea to an established drum/instrument maker rather than going your own way? DS: I wouldn’t have done much differently. It was a brilliant time -1980 through 1986 - and it was horrible when we ran out of money and had to downsize over the period 1987 through 1992, where we moved the factory three times and went from 140 staff to 10. But that rollercoaster ride was not unique to Simmons; it’s been repeated a thousand times in many industries where a global fashion takes hold for a few years and then is just as quickly rejected. When I first made an electronic drum kit, no-one in the music trade was interested in it. It was simply too bizarre for them. They didn’t even have a department they could easily slot it into. Did the drum department sell it, or did it go in with the organs, amplifiers or synthesizers? They’d have to put electricity in the drum department and amplifiers and train a drummer to work the thing. I never had a single offer from anywhere in the world for the company or its IP. The whole industry was surprised by the rapid emergence of the products and the brand. The big international musical instrument companies waited a couple of years and made their own versions and by the time 37