” This very, very special machine can be seen and heard in the 20 minute video “EPIC!!! ’80s Drums ‘n’ Echo: Roger Nichols WENDEL/WENDELjr Sequential Drumtraks Lexicon 224XL/LARC”, and the video shown in this listing “BEST IN THE WORLD!!! Sequential Circuits Drumtraks w/5 Tuners and 4 Individual Outputs Jamming In 4K” is an edited 7-minute excerpt from the full video that also shows other machines with examples of 1980s and 1990s music. Two of those WENDELjr drum machines with full drum kits of sounds are listed here in my other eBay listings.
This is the best Sequential Drumtraks available in the world. No one else has this.
This looks perfect and it works perfectly. The lithium backup battery is good with all patterns held by what I believe to be the original battery which presently reads 3.42v. Kids, in the 1980s we didn’t put these batteries in crappy tin-plated sockets so we could change the batteries ever 0.2 seconds because the batteries were good, they LASTED, usually decades. There are loads of 1995 Pentium PCs getting rained on in landfills that still have the original coin cells in them.
All controls work like brand new, and the sound is fantastic.
This is Drumtraks Model 400, serial number 400-2553. The Drumtraks was the world’s first MIDI drum machine released in 1983, the lookalike companion to the Prophet-5 analog synthesizer, the volume and tuning of each sound can be precisely programmed for each note.
This one has a rare modification which adds 5 analog drum tuning pots and four additional individual outputs.
The tuners and outputs are organized as 4 from the bottom up the same as the right four drum buttons right-left and the four rear outputs are the same right-left, and the top/5th pot is for the snare all the way over second from left which already had a factory output.
This machine has the factory Drumtraks crash cymbal and ride cymbal sounds which are absolutely excellent (hear sounds in the video above) and the factory MIDI upgrade software version 4 which has omni and poly modes over 16 MIDI channels, MIDI pads-out commands, velocity sensitivity via MIDI, the best version for using the Drumtraks as a sound module with a MIDI sequencer (but version 5 exists with improved MIDI sync), all in factory IC sockets.
All the other sounds have been replaced with six ZIF sockets with absolutely unbelievably killer sounds, just hear the snare in the video, it makes the whole machine huge. The custom sounds are the bass drum, snare drum, hi-hat (amazing), and two chips holding two custom percussion sounds each. The video lets you hear them all with the REAL 1980s reverb as they were used back in the 1980s.
This machine is in better than excellent condition (basically as right out of the box except for a rough area in the rear near the serial number tag where a producer’s label was removed) and everything works as new. I’ve had this machine here for 27 years, since 1996.
The circuitry that performs these modifications will not be photographed and the files of these sound chips will not be named, listed, or e-mailed out to people who always ask for them. This is a Synhouse exclusive. But isn’t it all?”
Click here to visit listing on eBay