I thought I’d share this for any "drum machine heads ", that aren’t aware of this product,pretty cool it’s designed to create perfect clock sync between midi and din sync. correcting latency, but then it give you the ability to syncopate your drum machines in a very interesting and useful way.
The creator of these boxes discusses the experience of syncopating two TR 808 's.
they have a cool website ( with cool rants about esoteric electronics philosophy) and have another product that syncs DAW’s via midi to hardware sequencers with perfect zero faultless latency and No setup hassles. expensive but worth it.
“Reliable clock pulses on a drum machine are to a beat maker, what an instruments pitch is to a concert pianist or gigging guitarist.”
They also have details of sequencer timing and sync tests they have conducted on many drum machines from CR68 , MPC’s to Electron Machines and Tempest. called the Litmus Tests. good stuff.
from [http://www.innerclocksystems.com/New%20ICS%20Sync-Shift%20MKII.html](http://www.innerclocksystems.com/New ICS Sync-Shift MKII.html)
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The Sync-Shift Mk II converts Midi Clock to Din Sync and allows real-time slave sync-start lag compensation to get both master and slave locked perfectly.
This example is one I think is useful. I have two TR-808 drum machines. They sound great as single units and they sound good locked together directly via a single Din Sync lead. The first thing you do when you lock them via the Sync-Shift is try the same patterns as before but offset them by rhythmically interesting intervals - 16ths, 8th note triplets etc - the cross polyrhythmic stuff you can find here is magical.
[justify]Playing with Time and Space
After you have played around with offsets for an hour or so and you settle on a groove you like it is then that the Sync-Shift MKII starts to reveal it’s real magic. Something happens when you start fine tuning the sync with the Shift Rotary control. What you thought was locked before becomes tighter and tighter. Hi-hats start phasing and tom rolls start to blend with kicks. If you pan different drum voices on a mixing desk, sounds start to dance around the L-R stereo field. The Rotary Shift control is fine enough to let you ‘play’ with the phase characteristic of voices across two synchronized machines. Spot on lock and the sonic image is dead centre. A fraction pushed and the image moves to the Left. A fraction dragged and the image pans right. Rim shots and snares start to blur so it becomes hard to tell one from the other. Now you start playing with individual voice levels on both machines. Pulling the kick drum back on one machine you start to lose the 115 bpm 4/4 accent you thought was so dominant and underneath it appears a 6/8 afro groove at what feels like two thirds the original tempo. Push the other kick back up slightly again and the 4/4 comes back into focus. It’s totally mind bending and you can lose yourself for hours. just make sure you’re recording it all. Many times I have tried the same experiment with direct Din Sync but it never gets quite the same ‘time travel’ type quality.
From experience and many days, hours and months looking at recorded waveforms - this quality only really appears when you get rhythmic transients (the attack portion of the sound) to really lock together. The tighter the transient lock between two or more machines the more rhythmic gymnastics you can achieve.
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