Simmons SDS6

A companion, with its own identity

The hexagonal pads made Simmons unmistakable on a stage. The SDS6 offered a second way into the same sound-generating rack. SDS5 modules could accept pad triggers and separate control inputs, so the sequencer could work alongside a drummer rather than stand in for one. The SDS6 is the black programming unit, not the hexagonal kit; an SDS5 photograph does not establish that its companion sequencer was present.

Kenneth McAlpine examined a prototype in February 1983, describing a 6502 processor, battery-backed memory and the new 8×32 matrix. By September, Rick Palmer was examining the SDS5/SDS6 combination, listing the sequencer separately at £1,437.50 including VAT. These are two dated views of its arrival, not a licence to turn prototype detail or an early price estimate into fixed production specification.

The bar you could see

To place a hit, the programmer chose one of eight vertical channels and one horizontal step position. A lit intersection marked the instruction. As the unit played, a moving column crossed the matrix; where it met a lit point, the corresponding output sent a trigger to a connected voice. McAlpine valued the chance to hear and revise a bar before committing it, while Palmer was less persuaded by step entry even as he found the continuous display helpful for spotting mistakes.

The full width offered thirty-two steps, but a reset point could shorten a bar. McAlpine’s prototype account also describes an extended short-bar mode; Palmer heard flexibility in shifting pace within an arrangement. The silent matrix here makes those relationships legible without asserting identical final-production behaviour, running firmware, or replaying a pattern.

The force behind each mark

The grid determined when a voice was called; another value influenced how strongly it responded. McAlpine documented nine programmable trigger-voltage levels. Palmer observed that changing control voltage affected a connected SDS5 module’s attack as well as apparent loudness. The diagram can show nine marks as a control idea, but cannot reproduce a particular rack, module or setting.

Simmons also provided a Humaniser. The period writers broadly agree it could loosen simultaneous events into a flam, but their technical descriptions are not identical. McAlpine’s prototype report describes selected-channel delay circuits and variable timing; Chris Everard’s 1984 review uses different language about randomness and dynamics. This supports an audible timing effect in the system, not a precise emulation derived from reviews alone.

A song made from smaller decisions

The hierarchy moved outward from one visible bar: bars to sequences, sequences to a larger song structure. McAlpine called the last level a “nest”; later reviews call it a song. A rear memory pack could carry programs away, while tape sync, trigger and footswitch connections put the SDS6 in a studio or live rig. Simmons’ June 1983 U.S. advertisement promoted up to 99 patterns, sequences and songs at each level, but that is a dated manufacturer capacity claim—not proof that 99 maximum-length songs fit at once.

Programs before records

In a 1984 interview about Howard Jones’s Human’s Lib, producer Rupert Hine said that reshaping the songs meant restructuring programs Jones brought for a Drumulator and a Simmons SDS6. That places the sequencer in the album’s programming method. It does not identify a finished track, sound, pattern or mix role.

The SDS6 wagered that a drummer’s decisions could be stored without becoming invisible. Its lights let a maker inspect a bar, alter a hit, change its force, and join the result to something longer. It belongs to the age of hexagonal electronic drums, but its question remains on its face: when rhythm becomes programmable, how does a musician still see its shape?