The SDE is a bit like a rack version of the Silicon mallet. It sounds similar to the DX7: nice bell sounds and any kind of (FM like artificial) chromatic percussion like mallets, e-pianos etc.... You can connect it to the SDS9 via midi. But it is not very clever to trigger a chromatic percussion expander with an SDS9 which can only trigger 6 midi notes with it's 6 channels. It would make more sense with an MTM as you can assign full chords to one pad. I doubt that SDE and SDS9 are a perfect pair
--- In Simmons_Drums@yahoogroups.com, "Jonathan" <capnfishy@...> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> There's one of these come up - I've googled it, but am still a bit unsure as to what it does.
>
> My understanding is that you can hook it up to eg SDS9 via MIDI & it creates (generally) percussiony sounds?
>
> Can you switch, on the fly, between the SDS9 voices & the SDE?
>
> It is described as an FM synthesiser - what does that mean/what are the implications on the noises it makes? I gather realism isn't high on the feature list, but it's not too high on mine either.
>
> I haven't really had chance to explore the SDS9 much yet as it's packed away while we sell our house, but it doesn't stop me from looking at more bits of kit! I've not done any MIDI yet either.
>
> Is this an obscure piece of kit for the die-hard or could it be useful?
>
> Thanks for any enlightenment you may care to give.
> Regards
> Jonathan
>