Ivor Drawmer

Ivor Drawmer was born and raised on Sark, a small island in the Channel Islands archipelago, where life steps back in time: to this day, cars are prohibited (other than farm vehicles), there is no lighting on the unpaved roads and the only 'bus' is a tractor with a trailer for the passengers. It is hard to imagine that these humble beginnings would be the origin of one of the most celebrated and enduring pro audio manufacturing companies in the world.

Ivor Drawmer harboured two passions: electronics and music. He was a self-taught pianist and built his first keyboard from parts acquired from wherever he could find them after discovering a tutorial in a magazine. He travelled to gigs on the nearby island of Guernsey and saw how the crowd reacted to the band and thought "I want some of that". He joined a band, with his handmade keyboard in tow, and to ensure that the 'show would go on' would carry a soldering iron on stage with him. Whilst playing keyboards in bands Ivor honed his electronics engineering skills at a test equipment company on Sark. However, the call of a more exciting life was hard to resist and Ivor moved to England in the 1960's.

Ivor soon found himself playing keyboards in a number of bands, earning a decent wage, seeing a possible future as a star. He bought himself a hammond organ, at that time the same price as a small house, though it was incredibly heavy to transport to gigs, so, in true Ivor Drawmer style, took a saw to it and cut it straight down the middle, to reassemble at gigs. He would find himself playing in bands on the club circuit of the North of England, touring German army bases and also recording sessions for the BBC and at Abbey Road Studios, in bands such as The Wolves, News, New Jersey Turnpike and Bitter Suite.

However, the passion for designing audio circuits never left him. "The whole thing started in 1981," said Ivor. "I had been playing keyboards with bands in Yorkshire, but that wasn't going so well and also I wasn’t getting any younger. With the encouragement of friends, I built a small batch of stereo delay lines, which I called the Multitracker, and that was the start of Drawmer." A year later, Drawmer Electronics was officially founded with the introduction of the DS201 Dual Noise Gate in 1982.

Ivor was in a recording studio, waiting to play his keyboard overdub, while a frustrated recording engineer fought unsuccessfully with the limitations of his equipment. Still trying to get the sound right on the drum kit, the engineer had gated the toms. In those days, gates were crude, on/off devices, and every time the drummer hit the crash, the tom mics opened and fairly vomited an unpleasant gnashing sound. Drawmer told the engineer that he could solve his problem and returned the next day with a primitive-looking circuit board that had two jacks hanging off it. The engineer put it in line, and Drawmer adjusted one of the pots that dangled from its wiry frame. To the engineer's amazement, even the softest tom hit opened the gate, while the loudest cymbal crash did nothing. What Ivor had designed was the world's first frequency-conscious gate. By forcing the key to listen only to low frequencies, of which toms have plenty and crashes have almost none, the gate became a much more sensitive tool. That design ultimately became the Drawmer DS201.

The DS201 transformed the gate into a powerful creative tool, playing a significant role in modern music production. "It was the kind of unit that people discovered uses for and it immediately enabled engineers to do the things they’d always dreamed of with minimum fuss," Drawmer explained. The dual-channel DS201 remains in production today, a testament to Ivor Drawmer’s genius.

In 1992, Drawmer took the innovative step of incorporating their newly developed 'Dynamics Spectral Enhancement' circuitry into a high-quality compressor/limiter, which enabled the user to dynamically boost any high-frequency energy lost during the full-band compression process. The resulting product, the DL251 Spectral Compressor was enthusiastically received by the mastering, broadcast and studio industries.

With the new series of compressors becoming established amongst professional users Drawmer decided to expand its range of tube products and, in 1994, released the 1961 Vacuum Tube Equaliser. An interesting design feature was the inclusion of a variable input level control on each of the two channels. This design approach allows the user to control the amount of 'warmth' by deciding how hard to drive the tubes, giving a sound as 'clean' as the best discrete solid state designs or as 'hot' as the 'hottest' vintage tube models. Soon after the 1962 Dual Channel Vacuum Tube Preamp and ever popular 1968 Dual Channel Tube Compressor were introduced.

Drawing on the many years of experience, Ivor and the Drawmer team next developed a series of lower-cost Drawmer dynamic signal processors, the MX Pro range, which incorporated many of the innovations found in high-end gear into products that were aimed at musicians, project studios and live performers who work to a tighter budget but are determined not to compromise on quality.

As we headed into the 21st century, the innovations continued with Ivor and the Drawmer team developing the active splitter designs in the form of the 4X4R Rackmount Splitter and the 4X4 Kickbox Portable Splitter, both of which have 4 active mic inputs and a total of 16 outputs that can be routed in various ways to suit their requirements, the 4X4 Kickbox being portable, waterproof and dustproof also.

Drawmer continued to listen to their customer base, who were encountered problems of noise control in nightclubs, pubs, theatres and also for radio dj's and audio engineers. The problem was that in order to comply with Noise at Work regulations many times these environments had switches that would turn off the power should noise levels be exceeded. Ivor felt this to be too crude by far. His solution: to prevent the audio from getting to these levels in the first place, but in a way that the users and customers would not notice. And so the SL22 Sound Level Limiter and SP2120 Speaker Protector came to be.

With the increase in the number of audio engineers producing music in DAW's in ever smaller, and even home studios came a new challenge: monitor controllers were either accurate but very expensive or inexpensive but at the cost of inferior sound reproduction. Ivor felt the absolute most important consideration when it comes to monitor control is that of reproduction and transparency of the highest quality and that Drawmer could produce a product that would achieve this at a price that consumers could afford, and so began Drawmer's move into the monitor control market with the MC2.1. A huge hit, it was soon followed in the range by others such as the CMC2, MC3.1 and MC7.1 to name a few.

During this time, a problem with digital gear cropped up over and over: people were using DAW's for their convenience but found them too sterile. Ivor listened to the market and realised he could bring the 1960's range up to date to add vintage characteristics and analogue musicality and so the 1970's range was born: Analogue mic/line/instrument preamplifiers in the form of the 1970 (an up-to-date take on the 1960), 1972 dual pre-amp and 1977 channel strip, all with a multitude of unique features designed by Ivor, such as the Lift function and variable saturation; the highly renowned 1973 three-band stereo compressor, which was also translated into digital plug-in form, with Softube’s popular Drawmer 1973 Multi-Band Compressor and Drawmer S73 Intelligent Master Processor; the 1974 analogue parametric equaliser; multiband saturation and width with the 1976; and a tone shaping compressor to add character to a mix in the form of the 1978.