Vintage Synth Explorer

Alesis • D4

The D4 was an affordable and fully professional Drum and Percussion sound module. It featured 500 drums sounds, sampled at 48kHz and stored on an internal ROM chip. The sounds cover the whole gamut, from great acoustic drum types to electronic drum sounds. Orchestral and ethnic percussion sounds and various percussive effects are also available. There are 21 programmable drum kits as well. And the D4 has full 16-channel MIDI implementation.

The D4 has 12 trigger inputs allowing drummers to trigger its sounds from acoustic or MIDI pads. Engineers and musicians can also trigger drum sounds from the D4 using the trigger inputs and any external sound sources from tape or other studio gear. A hi-hat pedal jack allows use of a footswitch to create more realistic hi-hat effects. There are also 4 independent outputs for either 4 mono outs or 2 stereo outs. The D4's only limitation, is editing. Drum sounds can only have their tuning, panning and respective volumes edited. However, drums can be assigned to special groups so that special drum characteristics can be created such as closed hihats cutting off open hihat sounds, etc. The D4 has been used by ATB.

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Tony Spielmacher

Posted 173 days ago

I bought this module rather unthinkingly, not fully realizing that every ROM synth has drum sets comparable to that of the D4. On top of that soft synths are on the rise with plenty of drum kits and drum programming features. But I have come to appreciate this working horse despite all these developments. First of all you don’t want to have the polyphony of your favorite hard board eaten up by a drum track, so a dedicated drum module is still a viable concept . Used within your sequencer it offers you great control over your drum track(s), it could mean tweaking every note you played on your keyboard to establish a ‘natural’ sounding drum line (as opposed to those out-of-the-box drum loops that are really not your own or are hard to control). You can copy an existing preset bank to a user bank and use this bank to build your ideal drum kit. Every midi key within range you can configure to your liking eliminating all those silly drum sounds you will never use.

Tony Spielmacher

Posted 173 days ago

Having the possibility to route notes to the AUX outputs (aside from panning them in the horizontal domain, loudness and some other attributes) you can attach your favorite effect processor to that AUX output and lead the outcome to your mixer or input. So just when you think these drum sounds are trite and overused you realize you can get great and instant results with (let’s say) standard guitar distortion stomp boxes and other effects. This is a great way to revitalize this module that has been used by thousands and thousands of bands and producers in the past. Needless to say you could also lead those sounds into your main synths for further processing if they have an input facility (e.g. Access Virus, Roland JP-8080 etc.). Having 12 triggers you could also hook this module up to drum pads sending MIDI to your sequencer the cool way! A used D4 can quite often be purchased for less than, or around $100 or Euro 100.

Andrew Beddoes

Posted 628 days ago

I met a sound person who would beef up live drum kits by hooking up cheap piezo triggers to the drums and feeding them into the D4. I used it as a brain for a practice kit with piezos in the pads. The sounds were good- just my drumming was awful.

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