EHX has always marched to the beat of a different drum, and they’ve even made a ton of funky drum pedals! Back when disco was king, EHX was pumping out pedals with trigger inputs like the famous Space Drum, and others like the Rolling Thunder, Sonic Boomer, Clap Track, Panic Button, etc. They also made simple drum pattern boxes like the DRM16 and DRM32 (Which I had the pleasure to use in a recording a few years ago). All of these were warm analog beats in the early days of the drum machine.

EHX can finally bring these great sounds to the 21st Century with this idea:

Imagine a pedal built into the Ravish enclosure. It has the Ravish’s LED output to let the user pick drum sounds (a list of them could be in the manual) from EHX’s past or even new ones. A list could look like:

“00 – Metronome
01 – Kick (From DRM16/DRM32)
02 – Kick (From Rolling Thunder)
03 – Kick (From Sonic Boom)
04 – Snare (From DRM16/DRM32)
..
..
21 – Space Drum (From Space Drum)
22 – Panic Button (From Panic Button)”

ETC.

It has two footswitches: a momentary switch for recording and a 3pdt switch for start and stop. Once you pick a tempo for your pattern, the LEDs would scroll to the tempo (like how they do on your AWESOME new 8-step). When you want to put a drum sound somewhere, just tap on the RECORD momentary footswitch. It is now added to the loop. Like if you picked kick, you could tap on the one-beat and on the five-beat (if it has 8-steps, in 4/4 time), now you’ve got a kick drum beat down.

Scroll to a new drum sound, tap where you want it. Layer to your heart’s content.

Let’s say you pick a sound like the Space Drum and you want to tweak the sound of it. EHX used to have deluxe versions of some of their drum sounds, and the Super Space Drum was one. You could fine tune where you wanted the start and stop frequencies of the sound, and how fast and deep you wanted the modulation to go. Those settings could be open to all drum sounds. You could tweak the tone and then tap it in your rhythm. When you save a pattern, the changed drum sounds used in the pattern could be saved as well.

Those big drum pads used in the old pedals aren’t necessary anymore now that drummers have custom pads to trigger such things, pedal geeks have things like the 8-Step Sequencer, and synth players have always had their CV sequencers, synthesizers with CV-out, etc. Just have a midi plugin for the drummers to input their triggers, CV in to plug in your 8-step or other sequencers, and a footswitch to save 100 presets instead of however many you can fit on the pedal itself.

Besides a regular output, maybe an output for the sequence (the tempo and the rhythm without any tones) for routing to other effects?

It would be incredible if this could be analog like the old pedals, but the wizardry in the newest digital effects leads me to believe that even digital tones would sound good and be fun for practice, experimenting, synth players, and more. Make this happen and send me one please!