Yamaha DTXpress/DTXplorer/DTXtreme

--- In DTXpress@yahoogroups.com, "gruvjunky" <gruvjunky@...> wrote:
> Would you agree then that it's the musician and not the gear that 
> ultimately makes the difference?
> 
> Cheers,
> JAM

Hi JAM,

Good musicians certainly do a better job of making inferior gear 
sound better, if only because their playing helps to overshadow it. 
And many kinds of "good musician" exist. I'd even allow the 
definition to include drummers with an uncanny ability to put 
together a great-sounding kit, for live and/or recording purposes. 

I also agree with what seems to have been part of your original 
point, that many e-kits have limitations that prevent them from 
duplicating the sensitivity and tonal complexity of acoustic drums, 
which even impacts "good"  musicians negatively. Better players know 
how to keep these limitations from getting in the way, but  
electronic snares that miss nuances like ghost and grace notes, or 
variations in accents in rolls can be frustrating nonetheless. You 
can't really avoid this problem without spending quite a bit of 
money, and spending it judiciously. After a while, trying to avoid 
what doesn't work well can be tedious, to say the least.

I'd never heard a DTXpress kit recorded in a good studio until one of 
our regulars from this site's pioneering years sent me a CD on which 
he used his modified DTXpress. The nice thing about recording with 
electronic drums is the ability to avoid the time-consuming choice of 
mics, their positions, levels, etc. Going directly through the board 
also permits processing that the module cannot do, or do well enough, 
on sounds that may come across as flat and one-dimensional or worse. 
Nonetheless, with all the care that everyone took to make the 
DTXpress come across well on this particular recording, it still 
stuck out, if not like a sore thumb like a . . . well, an e-kit, 
especially since one the cuts featured a well-recorded acoustic kit. 
The ddrum module has no such trouble.

I'm willing to bet that your DTXpress III performs more suitably in a 
top-forty setting than in a strictly jazz one. I say this as someone 
who fully appreciates the value and flexibility of the DTXpress and 
similar Roland, Pintech, etc. products. The first time I laid my 
hands on the DTXpress I, after a brief and unpleasant experience with 
electronic precursors in the 1980s, I was wildly impressed. But an 
idea for an interesting thread might be to have people who use their 
e-kit mainly as a substitute for an acoustic kit to explain to what 
extent it works for them and to what extent it doesn't. 

Ed