This is a cool one. It is not well known although i cannot understand why because it can produce and endless varienty of synthesized percussion and drum sounds, far beyond the boring Simmons-Piuuuuu. I picked it from the bay because i had lots of fun with my other PEARL, the DRX-1. But the SC-40 turned out even better.

The specs:

• The "40" means it can produce 4 sounds at once (not 40 ? no, only 4)
• Although it has 4 voices there are 8 Pad-Slots
• each Pad can be fired by a 6.3 mm -jack trigger-in OR (have a seat) .. MIDI (although it tends to hangup when fired with extensive data)
• each Pad has (if you like) an individual out or goes to the sum-out
• each Voice is made of: 1 digital Wavegenerator and Noise, 2 Bandpassfilters and 4 Envelopegenerators, see blockdiagram to the right. You can tweak the 'tone' and the 'attack'-part separately and set the balance of both.
• The 32 waveforms sound like cheap 12 bit samples with a loopphase. Some sound like sine or a chime or a gong. I put up a soundfile with all the waveforms below.
• you can store (!) 4 x 8 Banks, each with 8 Pad-Parametersets (=Sounds)

listen to a short demo

here is a clip where i tweaked some parameters to give you a little impression af the large bandwidth of sound this thing can produce.

update 2009: here are some patterns with different sounds of the sc40, played via midi from an electribe s. It was a lot of work to manually set the receive-note-number for each of the 8 sounds of the 8x4 kits but its worth the effort. Now the kits can be switched while the unit is being fired with a midipattern. Its a good idea to get an electribe as a companion to the sc40. Together they work like a tr 808-stepprogramming, hybrid drummachine. .... yesss, i knoooooow, midi does not have THAT thightness of a hardwaresequencer, you know what? i nevertheless LOVE midi.

pattern 1

pattern 2

pattern 3

pattern 4

pattern 5

pattern 7

pattern 8

pattern 9

pattern 10

pattern 11

pattern 12

pattern 13

pattern 14

pattern 15

pattern 16

A note on the patterns: you will notice some drops of individual sounds in the patterns. Well the sc40 can aonly make 4 sounds at once. If it is demanded to fire more than 4 via midi or if some decays are rather long, it decides for itself which sound to drop. That CAN sound quite interesting.

License: use the pattern in your songs, personal and commercial, make money, get rich. But patterns might NOT be used for commercial sample-CDs.

and here come some assorted single samples. they arent cut or normalized, just some audiofiles to listen to.

Bass Drums

Snare Drums

Toms

HiHats and Cymbals

Effectsounds

And all 32 waveforms :)

some notes about the last clip: the waveforms are stepped through with a parametersetting as neutral as possible. The bandpassfilter emphasizes the frequencies wherever it lies, means: if i set it to high you wont get bass, if i set it to low you wont get the crisper part. So i set a typical envelope to get the most out of both worlds.

license as above

Some closing words: i am still on the hunt for some more info about the Pearl Syncussion SY-1 to make a clone and to support more infos about this gem. I still try to get a readable schematic of it. There is a rather large one around the web but the values for the parts are not readable and the transistor-types are not noted at all.

The parameters

Backside

Inside - lots of chips!

Custom chips - ooooh

Blockdiagram