Dynacord showed its new digital-drum system at Frankfurt Musikmesse in March 1984. Period coverage named the Percuter as its eight-channel controller, with sounds stored on exchangeable chips; an October One Two Testing review found the first British dealer stock due that September. By March 1986, Electronics & Music Maker called the Percuter S the renamed successor to the original Percuter and described the system reaching British shops with around 60 cartridge voices.
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The machine keeps turning up.
Peter Gill / Frankie Goes to Hollywood / Liverpool / Amsterdam album backing-track sessions
Peter Gill describes programming a Roland TR-808, using its trigger outputs with a Dynacord Percuter and Roland DDR-30, then synchronising them to add electronic drums to recorded backing tracks.
Read “Frankie Goes To Liverpool” ↗Frankfurt: sounds on chips
The Percuter arrived in a moment when electronic drums were still largely asking players to strike a pad and accept a fixed electronic voice. At Frankfurt in 1984, Dynacord presented a different proposition: an eight-channel controller whose natural drum sounds lived on interchangeable chips. Alongside it were the ready-to-play Digital Hit modules and the Boomer programmer for creating new sound chips. The central idea was modular from the beginning: the system changed when its sound cartridges changed.
Period press
Dynacord Percuter kit in One Two Testing, October 1984
“Dynacord digital drums” review, exact photograph of the Percuter pad system.
A kit assembled from voices
One Two Testing met the complete system that autumn: a shallow eight-channel Percuter, pentagonal pads, a library of fifty plug-in sampled-sound modules and a Big Brain sequencer route. Every channel had its own input and output, with sensitivity control for matching a pad to a player. The magazine put the basic five-pad package just below £1,000 and the eight-pad version at £1,400, stands excluded. Those are 1984 British dealer figures for specific packages, not a universal price for every Percuter rig.
Built to be struck
The photograph from that review matters because it shows what the system was selling: a playable kit, not simply a rack of sample memory. Dynacord’s white pentagonal pads, metal hardware and black-logo bass pad gave the package a physical identity. The review found the pads solid and the cartridge swaps quick; it also heard the limits of early sampled cymbals and the occasionally mechanical character of rapid rolls. The resulting story is more interesting than a perfect-specification myth: a serious drummer’s instrument negotiating the first generation of reusable digital drum sounds.
From Percuter to Percuter S
The later Percuter S was not a separate invention dropped from the sky. Electronics & Music Maker’s 1986 review calls it “formerly just Percuter” and describes an eight-channel unit whose front sockets accepted the ROM cartridges. It praised the robust pads, reviewed roughly sixty drum, cymbal and percussion voices, and listed an approximate British price of £1,000 for Percuter S and pads, with stands extra. The updated name gives the original machine a lineage rather than obscuring it.
The groove behind the band
Peter Gill of Frankie Goes to Hollywood gave the Percuter a practical studio role in a 1986 Sound On Sound interview. He described programming an old TR-808, sending some of its trigger outputs to a Percuter and others to a Roland DDR-30, then locking the machines to a backing track so electronic drums could be added to a live guitar-bass-drums foundation. It is a working method, not a claim that one named Frankie recording was made by the Percuter alone. But it catches the machine in its natural habitat: part of a larger rhythm system, sharpening a band performance without replacing it.
Sources
The visual archive