I occasionally get asked to burn some eproms. Twice I’ve been asked to fix LinnDrum sounds for Drumtraks. The good thing about many old drum machines is that they use the same type of eproms and audio compression. For example, you can take the kick eprom from a LinnDrum and put it directly in a Drumtraks.

In some cases, two sounds share the same eprom. One example is the Drumtraks where the first 4 kB in an 8 kB eprom is the clap and the last 4 kB is the tambourine. In the LinnDrum each sound has a 4 kB eprom each. Most probably because the larger the eproms were, the more expensive they were. And the Drumtraks is a couple of years newer than the LinnDrum, hence the larger eproms. So the thing is that sometimes you have to merge and sometimes you have to split. And sometimes it just fits. This process is 100% non-destructive, not a single byte is changed!

Anyway “Thomas Q-force” asked me to replace all sounds except the ride and crash in his Drumtraks with LinnDrum samples. He chose the standard sounds with the exception of the toms, where he selected the alternative, but official, “tom7”. Sounds great in my opinion! The LinnDrum sounds are much better than the stock Drumtraks sounds. This really shows the potential of the Drumtraks and I find it strange that it’s so cheap compared to a LinnDrum.

View video on YouTube (opens external site in new window)