Ibanez DM-1000

Category:  Products / fx units / delay

Added: 14-Sep-08  |  Author: admin

New price: discontinued  |   S/H price: 60 quid or so

Company Link:  No company link

Ibanez DM-1000

Ah the good old DM-1000!.. one of the first of the new wave of cheap Jap FX processers which hit the market back in the mid/late 80's - Cheap as chips they were back then at around 199 quid which was good at the time! - I actualy owned one of these back around 1985 and it was a great bit of kit for the time offering clean, clear delay and related time-based FX such as Chorus, Flanging, etc.

The DM-1000 offered delay times up to a whopping (at the time) 900ms (almost a whole second!) at 8Khz bandwidth. The delay-time is adjusted using a combination of 2 controls - One 'switching time' selector and then a PLUS/MINUS multiple pot to adjust the chosen delay range up or down in time to the required delay in Milliseconds. The rest of the unit is also typical of early 80's delays, featuring further control pots to adjust Modulation and Feedback etc.

The reduced max bandwidth of 8kHz means you got decent but not super-sparkley delay which was great, and at the time this wave of cheap Japanese imported digital units started to offer great prices for such items which just a year or 2 previously had been out of the reach of the budget and home-studio. Back in the early 80's the broke-assed home-studio owner was having to stick with tape-delay or use a choice of perhaps harsher or noisier cheap analog delay units - However in retrospect nowadays those early budget analog delay units now offer great character in a world of super digital cleaness, so don't dismiss early analog delays.

Anyways, a great simple no frills delay unit which also had a 'sample' or rather a 'HOLD' button - This HOLD button simply would capture the incoming sound into the memory-chip and HOLD it there before it was delayed and then sent back out of the unit. So in practice, one had to immediately push the HOLD button as soon as a sound inputted into the unit... This was hit and miss, but the more you got used to it, with some practice you could sample sounds by hitting HOLD at just the right time... You had to be quick tho!

Once that sound WAS captured into the memory chip, it would then just loop round and round infinately until one de-latched the HOLD button. A bit of a pointless novelty therefore in some ways as there was no way to edit, trim or trigger the captured sound!... but I did find a use for this feature as a metronome function beleive it or not!

You could make any snappy sound like snapping your fingers into a mic - send that fingersnap into the DM-1000 and then with it 'HELD' and looping around automaticaly, you could then adjust the delay time and the captured 'sample' would actualy raise/lower in pitch/time - Thus you could adjust the looping 'fingersnap' sound to the required tempo! - lol

Other than that I used it like any straight delay. The sound is good and not to bright which actualy makes it ideal for Dub and reggea work (which is mostly what I did at the time), and because the DM-1000 has knobs instead of cursors, you could do all sorts of wacky realtime echo-fx by latching the HOLD button and then tweaking the captured sound into all sorts of floating weird emanations!...

Open a big front-panel image of the DM-1000


Anyways... The Ibanez DM-1000... Anyone use one or used to use these?... Please add some user comments!...

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