Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546135
18 FA L L 2 0 2 6 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y JEFFREY S. WEXLER AWARD MEET THE RECIPIENTS DIGIDESIGN: EVAN BROOKS AND PETER GOTCHER B y M a t t F o g l i a C A S This led to the creation of the Sound Designer software. "[T]he original usage of all this came from wanting to edit sounds for the drum chips that we had, and that's how Sound Designer came into being," Evan recalls. "That was our original package … it had nothing to do with audio recording. It was all destructive editing on individual samples, and it was meant to be used in concert with a digital sampling keyboard as kind of the front and back end." Peter Gotcher and Evan Brooks' first company, Digidrums, was founded in 1984. Peter, who was a drummer, owned an E-mu Drumulator, which was the first affordable programmable drum machine. The company initially focused on creating drum samples to work with the machine—which they successfully did. Samples from their "Rock Drums" set can be heard on "Shout" by Tears for Fears and "Beastie Groove" by Beastie Boys, among others. While they initially wanted to add more features, there were two main limitations. "One was the fact that the Mac just wasn't fast. It wasn't fast enough to do everything that we wanted to do because, ideally, you want it in real time, right? You want that modify listen cycle to be instantaneous. You turn a knob and you're hearing it. You don't want to turn a knob and then have to get a cup of coffee and come back and hear the result of that." Evan continues, "And the second problem we had was audio quality. The Mac was forward-thinking enough to have 8-bit audio—it was compounded, but it had an 8-bit output. So, we had some digital audio output, but it sounded like crap, and that's why we were using the digital sampling keyboards as front and back ends. So, we had these two problems: Lack of power and lack of high- quality audio I/O." E-mu Drumulator. Photo courtesy of Andreas Gortan.