By March 1985, Electronics & Music Maker reviewed the SDS1 as Simmons’ self-contained sampled drum pad, priced at under £250 in the UK. It treated the instrument as a playable extension for an acoustic or electronic kit, rather than a rhythm box with its own pattern sequencer.
A Simmons pad that carried its sound
The SDS1 folded a digital sample player into the familiar hexagonal Simmons pad. Paul White’s 1985 review describes a sound stored on a plug-in EPROM, while the operating instructions describe the same single-pad idea in practical terms: choose a stored drum sound, strike the surface and let playing force shape the result. It was not a miniature drum machine. It was one playable sound source that could be put where a drummer needed it.
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Change the chip, change the drum
The front-panel socket accepted 64K or 128K EPROMs. Simmons sold a library of acoustic and electronic sounds, and its separate EPB unit offered a route to making new chips from recorded material. That made the SDS1 a small but unusually open instrument for its moment: a player could keep the physical pad and exchange the stored voice.
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Dynamics with a moving pitch
The pad’s piezo trigger translated a strike into both an event and a level response. White also singled out pitch bend and the adjustable run function, which could sweep the pitch through a roll or fill. The point was not to imitate a preset accompaniment pattern. It gave a drummer a way to make a sampled sound move under the stick.
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A bridge into a larger kit
White framed the SDS1 as useful to an acoustic drummer looking for occasional unfamiliar colours and to owners of the SDS5 or SDS8 who wanted sampled material alongside their electronic voices. The manual also permits external triggers from a sequencer, gate, tape or acoustic source. It belongs in the Simmons story as a portable, single-voice bridge between playing a pad and working with sampled sound.
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