...next President of the United States, and greatest drummer
in the world apart from that bloke in Def Leppard.
Doktor Avalanche started life as a Boss DR55 'Doctor Rhythm'
machine... but ours was always called 'Doktor Avalanche'.
That DR55 was a far more primitive device (even) than the DR55s of
today.
If we can remember rightly, it had only four sounds: kick, snare,
rimshot and hi-hat. One mono output, of course. For programming, it
had an eight-beat stave, and sequencing was performed by switching
on the fly between the few patterns it would hold in RAM. The DR55
had no non-volatile memory or offload facility
for storing these patterns when the power was off. Still,
reprogramming it was quick enough, as it held so little. It
certainly sounded primitive, the biggest problem being the
inability to separately treat the sounds of kick and snare,
which lacked any kind of attack... unless one turned the volume up
to excruciating levels, which of course one did. It didn't sound
bad, exactly, just ... primitive.
The Roland TR606 came next. A few more sounds, a bit more
memory, and individual volume controls. We liked it. Eventually
someone worked out that it was possible to drill holes in the
back and gain individual outputs, but by then we had a
Roland TR808. In the early nineties, as acid house was
developing a cult around this drum machine, it was suddenly very
fashionable to riff along to TR808 sounds. We did that almost
ten years earlier, when the cocktail drinking classes and the
NME thought it was a bloody stupid idea. (One wet afternoon in
the early eighties, we switched the Doktor to play the usual
stuff but twice as fast. Hey presto! Drum'n'bass! This was
interesting for about ten minutes. Even Cabaret Voltaire
couldn't manage to make it interesting for much longer.
Please don't tell us it's interesting now.)
The TR808 was really the first serious drum machine. The kick
and snare still needed savage eq (and they didn't take kindly
to it), the tom-toms were a complete waste of time, but otherwise
it was a decent machine. Individual outputs, tunable drums,
enough memory.
Ben Gunn once managed to press the TR808's dangerous red button
as we were about to go onstage in Brussels, so Andrew had to
reprogram the whole damn machine while everybody else was
tuning their guitars up (slowly).
We had a Roland TR909 briefly. Its cymbal and hi-hat
noises were the only major improvements on the TR808, as far
as we can remember.
The Doktor was an Oberheim DMX by the time we made the
first album. The Oberheim had a (relatively) huge memory, it
would synchronise accurately to tape via FSK and the memory
could be backed up reliably onto cassette. Each drum was
tunable (inside), and Oberheim offered a few alternative
sounds. Events could be programmed to happen around the beat,
not just on it. The DMX would flam happily. We liked the
Oberheim better than the LinnDrum, which was more expensive
and sounded too sterile. The DMX kicks were a bit flabby, and
the snare was maybe not quite tight enough; the tom-toms were
good.
And a new age was dawning: soon it became possible to send
the DMX back to the factory and have ... midi! put on it.
Unfortunately the midi retrofit was expensive.
By the time 'Floodland' was being written, Andrew had spent
all the ready cash on a computer and a sequencer, and was
looking for a reasonably priced midi drum machine with a
tighter snare drum. So he got a Yamaha RX5 for the
snare sound (the kick was quite tight too) and wrote the
album with that.
Having already abused the sampling delay units of that era
(and some very complicated chains of
painstakingly-tuned Drawmer gates) to trigger captured drum
sounds, the first dedicated samplers were a godsend.
Until then, even the AMS delay unit had a maximum seven
seconds of memory, and that cost a fortune. A rare treat.
Mostly we had only had access to Bel units
with a couple of seconds at 8 bit resolution. Both had to
be triggered by hand or audio key. By the
time 'Floodland' was recorded, we had an
Akai S900 sampler. Like manna from heaven. Most of the
drums on 'Floodland' came via the Akai. The DMX toms were
resampled from the drum machine and off tape. Resampled RX5
kick, snare and hats formed the rest of the skeleton crew.
We've been creating samples ever since, but we don't collect
much any more; one encounters the same old samples
circulating the globe under different names. Some of them
sound suspiciously like they've been sampled off Sisters
records.
It's been a long time since we changed one of the
Doktor's standard voices.
We've created and collected a lot of "special effects" drum
sounds, but we don't use them live because the sound would
vary too wildly
from song to song. It's not a practical solution unless you
have everything submixed with automation - or running off a
tape machine, like certain electronic bands we know (and
all of the very famous ones we don't know). They might as
well just play the record. We like a bit of risk, and we like
to be able to tinker with things from concert to concert.
The Akai S900 is still a perfectly fine drum sampler. Its
grainy sound can be an advantage. We nevertheless upgraded
to the
Akai S1000 sampler. This is still the core of the
onstage Doktor. For recording we use an Akai S3200 in
case we want to take a digital output. The various merits
of these two samplers are discussed briefly on
the Samplers page.
The live Doktor still uses the
original Sequencer Plus sequencer
program. Andrew uses this at home as well. Adam is a
Logic user.
The first computer used for the Doktor's brain was a Compaq
286 Portable.
Andrew's got it in his Retirement Home For
Struck-Off Doktors. You can find a description on the
Personal Kit page. It had
space inside for the ISA card which linked to an
interface for midi (a Voyetra Technologies version
of the MPU401) and FSK sync. The midi interface had
one input and one output port. The Compaq 286 Portable
was the main workhorse on 'Floodland'.
At around the time 'Floodland' was finished, we got a
Compaq Portable III, a 386 with 640k RAM and a
slightly bigger hard drive. We then bought a spare one
from Trevor Horn (complete with some Pet Shop Boys
sequences which his engineer had forgotten to erase) and
last year we picked up a third - in the nick of time, as
it turned out.
The Compaq Portable IIIs have a piggy-back box
with slots for a midi interface card. Well,
two of ours do. They have great plasma display panels
and our machines have - until recently - been
utterly reliable.
Recently, our first two Compaq Portable IIIs started
failing. They're very old. Compatible spare parts are
increasingly hard to find for motherboards like these,
so we decided to completely renew the Doktor's head.
Regular laptops don't have slots for our interface
cards; docking stations are a pain, and the combination
is usually not rugged enough anyway. We
borrowed a hugely expensive "ruggedized" laptop (with
slots) from a very nice company down south - and
promptly broke it. It was time to join the army.
After talking for some time to a very suspicious secretary,
we managed to get through to the awfully nice people at a
certain defence contractor in Leeds. Usually they make
military-specification field devices for launching
bad stuff at even badder people. That sounded appropriate,
so once we'd discussed the possibility of razing Lancashire
to the ground (which is apparently not an option right now),
we asked them to put together a computer from the most
primitive components currently available - which means a
fast 486 motherboard - in a shock-resistant rackmounted
enclosure, with auto-switching power and a plasma display.
We wanted it to run DOS 3.3 and we wanted an identical
spare rig, because cargo-handlers do more damage than the
average military encounter, and we like to have one Doktor
running while we're fixing the other. In extreme cases we
can make one working Doktor out of two broken ones. We've
never had to use the taped Doktor (DAT) which we carry for
the ultimate emergency.
The new computers are custom-built, so the model doesn't
have a name. We'll try to think of something that sits
nicely with the rest of the super-destructive company catalogue.
Plasma displays are very hard to get at the moment, so we ended
up with rather poor monochrome LCD panels. Soon we'll
have to cough up considerably more cash and get some posh LCD
panels which the Nurse can actually see on stage. Plasma's best.
Regular computer monitors are simply too fragile for road use,
although on longer tours we have bus-room to take one with us,
wrapped in a very large towel.
The motherboards and the hardware are happy to talk to each
other, but both of them were initially reluctant to talk to
each other and DOS 3.3. We think we've coaxed them into
it.
DOS 3.3 is the world's best operating system for running
sequencers - as long as those sequencers aren't necessarily
expecting to find something more "advanced". DOS 3.3 won't
let its timing or its very stability get confused by
peripheral distractions that nobody actually needs (like
Graphic User Interfaces). Our friend Mike who works with
Erasure says that the tutu boys are still using old BBC
computers for much the same reason.
Our next problem will come when the midi interfaces die
of old age. Since the first Portable III we've been
using Voyetra Technologies V24S midi interfaces,
which have four midi input ports, four midi output
ports (all of which are busy), audio trigger and
SMPTE input/output. They don't make them anymore.
It's time to see what other similarly-equipped
interfaces the sequencer program will talk to as reliably
as it talks to its stablemates. Somehow, we're not too
optimistic.
If Adam has his way, the live Doktor might switch to
running Logic on
Apple Powerbooks or i-Books through Studio 5 interfaces
on the modem port. There are a couple of Powerbooks whose
interrupt handling is adequate for midi, but Andrew has
his doubts about the hardware, the latency times and the
stability of the sequencer/OS combination.
Sequencer Plus under DOS 3.3
has only ever crashed on us
twice. Discounting hardware/power issues, it's
never crashed during a gig. That's something the
Atari/Mac community can only dream about.
Technology Links
Dear Doktor
Sisters Homepage
The Reptile House (Merchandise)
Merciful Release (Label)
Links Index