Ok - so I bought one, off a guy on a mailing list, 'cause I was a bit annoyed at myself. Saw the same machine at a pawnshop a week before, and DIDN'T buy it for the $75 CAD they were asking. When I went back, it was gone, and I was depressed, even though I didn't want it that badly in the first place.

Wow, was I ever wrong!

The sequencer on this thing - well, it sucks. The only decent way I've found to put in patterns is to hook it to my roommate's Roland vdrums and let him play.

So here's why it rocks: every drum on the thing (there are a total of five kits, and they all sound fairly similar, but you can get more kits with [hard to find] option cards). The decay for each drum is tunable too!

So, let my roommate play some hard breakbeats into the thing, fill a few banks of patterns with sketchy breakbeats, then tune the drums up, drop the decay down, and use the tap-tempo (yes! Finally!) feature to bring it up to about 190bpm. INSTANT JUNGLE!

The sounds are perfect for loud, out-of-hand jungle and drum&bass. Pair this thing with a BassStation or Juno-106, and find a drummer with MIDI pads, and you're pretty much setup as a D&B producer.

Man, I can't praise this box enough! Why hadn't I heard of it before? It's the bomb!

If you find one under $100, do yourself a favour and buy it.

Yes the sounds that are built in are cheesy (hey, wadda expect for 12 bit at 32K?), but it works well, the pads have a clean throw from off to full velocity with a good tactile response, I've never had it die on me unexpectedly and the various decay/tuning/velocity parameters are tweakable via MIDI in real time.

I normally use mine as "programming box," generating MIDI ons & velocity for a sequencer which I then bring into some of the odder, weirder pieces of software in my studio. I take the sequences that result from my patterns, tweak them slightly to clean up a few glitches from my crappy playing technique, and bring them into Bol Processor as sound objects. From there, I am able to manipulate the sound objects in sequence back to the DDD-1 as a tone generator, adding some control data along the way via a Peavey 1600 slider unit.

The only thing I wish was different about the beast is the need to have a flash RAM card to hold samples.

Great lil' machine otherwise.