A brief history of the once-unloved Syncussion, a drum synth designed for actual drummers that became a mainstay of modern electronic music production.
The customers for Gibson guitars are guitar players. The customers for Pearl drums are drummers. The market for people who buy drum machines, though, has changed a lot over the years and you can see this in the original drum machines and “synth drums” made in the 1970s. The manufacturers really didn’t know who they were making these things for, and had no clue of the kind of people that would pick them up and even less of a concept of the weird shit they would do with them.
That’s the charm of the synth drums of the ’70s — they feel wide open, able to do weird things that you can’t imagine anyone would want but which, with a few tweaks, might do something nobody’s ever done before.
Electronic music at the time was mostly made in rooms with huge consoles by guys who looked like warlocks and wore capes on stage. The Syncussion wasn’t designed for them.
The Syncussion was made by Pearl, the venerable Japanese drum manufacturer. It was clearly a defensive move, designed to get a toehold in a potential future where electronic drums would dominate popular music (and here we are!)
Electronic music at the time was mostly made in rooms with huge consoles by guys who looked like warlocks and wore capes on stage. The Syncussion wasn’t designed for them. It was provisionally created for use by drummers themselves, and the Syncussion box was originally intended to be hooked up to electronic pads that are hard to find these days.
Pearl’s marketing was at pains to emphasize that while the Syncussion made some cosmic new sounds, it was created as a “player-designed unit” — in other words, for actual drummers to play.
And originally that’s exactly who used these. You can hear pinhead, tweaker-type sounds generated by the Syncussion on records from Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark and reputedly some tracks from Prince. Think of that very gated sound of New Order or other New Wave bands which featured actual drummers playing drums: that’s the niche where the Syncussion originally found an audience.
Syncussions began hitting pawn shops as New Wave began to fade and studios found other ways to synthesize drum sounds. They were then picked up by people who did not play drums at all: electronic musicians like 808 State, Aphex Twin — all the way to the present where you can detect the sounds of the Syncussion in records from Cinthie and Wallace. Syncussions are eminently tweakable devices, much more so than many others of its kind. (This might be heresy but sometimes the drums of the Syncussion go better with acid than even an 808’s drum sounds.)
Original Syncussions are priced around the same as one of those original 808s and 303s — one will put you out a few thousand bucks in any condition. The Syncussion has been relentlessly cloned, with highly-rated products emerging from Michigan Synths (costing about $600) to most recently another cookie-cutter take-out slab from Behringer that sells for a couple hundred dollars.
The Syncussion has also been cloned in software. About two years ago Soft Computing came out with a cheap and no-frills clone which we haven’t tried but has some surprisingly wary feedback on Bandcamp.
Then, this month, Aly James Lab released a Syncussion all their own. Their plugin with the aggressively nerdy name “SY-4X” is designed to not just emulate but expand upon the original Syncussion hardware in ways that hardware hasn’t and in one case can’t.
What immediately stands out is an option in the settings: the “4X” in the title refers to four separate modules — in other words, four Syncussions in one. While some of the modules allow for additional modding, the four modules are designed for “creating an 8-voice drum kit,” the developer notes, “four mono synths, or a four-voice poly synth. You can also mix modes, such as three modules in Drum Kit mode and one in mono synth mode.”
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What is less noticeable but equally as important is the addition of two more modes. The original Syncussion and most of the clones offer six modes (lettered A, B, C, D, E and F) which was intended to allow drummers to generate different types of sounds using presets. While you could entertain yourself for quite a long time with the six modes, Aly James Lab blows the top off this hardware limitation with two more modes lettered “G” and “H.” That’s what there is to love about this: rather than just a collection of samples with some sliders for sweeps, SY-4X was obviously made by someone deeply invested in the original Syncussion but someone that also had the confidence to try to take it a step further. There are a lot of these improvements across the SY-4X, in addition to aspiring to reproduce the original instrument’s audio palette.
The look and feel of SY-4X is brilliant. While we love minimalistic plugins, SY-4X has an interface that feels like you can reach out and grab it. Knobs and sliders are generally where an experienced user would expect them but with an addition of level readings represented by solid bars.
This brilliant plugin is available for 64 bit Macs and PCs as a VST3 or AU plugin to your DAW. It’s not cheap for a plugin but it’s a bargain for how much work went into this and how much you can get out of it: €51 (about $56).
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LOVE IS THE MESSAGE: This was originally published in 5 Mag Issue #216 featuring Andy Compton of the Rurals on 50 albums and 25 years of Peng, Ralph Session cover mix, Chicago’s Noble Square Records’ deep house love affair and more. Become a member for $2/month and get every issue in your inbox right away!
[…] Screen Grab: Synth Drum Lovers’ Delight. A brief history of the once unloved Syncussion and Aly James Lab’s new emulation […]