Yamaha DTXpress/DTXplorer/DTXtreme

--- In DTXpress@yahoogroups.com, "adamh52683" <ash0151@r...> wrote:

> Some of you here seem to be VERY familiar with the module and its 
> capabilities.  I'm wondering if you don't share your custom sound 
> settings or kits because giving them out would be like losing a 
> trade secret ;-)  Makes me wonder what a dtxpressII is really 
> capable of if I was only as knowledgeable as some of you other 
guys! 

Adam,

In my case (and I justify answering only because I have been around 
here a long time, not because I consider myself an expert on the 
DTXpress), I never went around posting my settings because I'm not 
convinced that anyone else would be hopped up about them. I've 
actually spent a lot of time with hi hats. I've been outspoken about 
them as being a particular weakness of electronic kits, in both of 
their aspects as physical components and as sampled/modeled voices. 
I'm proud of having had a hand in bringing Visu-lite's Yamaha-
compatible hi hat to market, which from my perspective went a long 
way toward making the experience of playing an electronic hi hat 
approximate that of playing an acoustic one. But that kind of 
convergence isn't everyone's cup of tea. We've spent quite a few 
posts on this board investigating how electronic hi hats do their 
work, and how they might be improved. OGD has done a lot of 
dissection and analysis in words and pictures. I feel like hi hats 
are a perpetual work in progress. Even the ddrum hat, which is my 
hands-down favorite for nuance and realistic sound, suffers from the 
same kind of short attention span in the half-open area that 
traditionally has afflicted the Yamahas and Rolands. The TD-20 may 
well represent a genuine advance in that respect, and the DTXPressIII 
shows definite promise. I can only imagine how good the DTXtremeIIS 
is. It's taken a while for the next generation to arrive.

When I used the DTXpressI as my hi hat module, the only hi hat that I 
liked was a tweaked version of the one in the GM Jazz kit. I used it 
as the basis for every hat that I ever created in my user kits. It's 
the only one that ever had the high-frequency snap that I tend to 
favor. I'll gladly release the settings for OGD's spreadsheet, but I 
am hardly proud of my lack of imagination (I must admit that even 
with the wealth of options in the ddrum sound library, I keep coming 
back to one hi hat in my kits there, too). Maybe it's age, but the 
things that people come up with on this board, and others, never 
cease to amaze me. As long as I've been doing this, I keep learning 
about new territory to be explored and discovering people with 
interesting ideas about using and programming their kits. The guys 
with seniority certainly don't have a lock on anything.

Ed