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Instrument: Yamaha DTXplorer Electronic Drum-kit. How it should look.  Price New: £700-£800 Retail, but you can perhaps cut it to £600 if you sweet-talk the sales assistant, show them your 10-year-old loyalty card or whatever.  Year Manufactured: 2007-08 Specs: Retail model ships with:
Of course, the 7 pads are totally customisable. Case in point, I have the "floor-tom" set as the ride. Sound: 9/10 Really, honestly, the sounds that come out of are immense. It has so many different styles of sound patches (or "voices", as Yamaha like to call them), and the quality of each one is impeccable. The dynamics are fully customisable which really does just make it sound like a real kit. My sole complaint, however, is that while there are many different styles available, there is usually not much choice within that particular style, ie: there are really only a few tom/cymbal voices suitable for "normal" play (though all tom voices do have 3 variants for low/middle/hi). However, there are plenty snare and kick voices for pretty much anything and every voice can be pitch-tuned by up to +/-24. It comes with the ability to enter stereo outputs and set up the position in the stereo field that a particular pad will come from. I think the settings are left 60 to right 60, so a fair bit of fine tweaking is possible there. A sample will be forthcoming when I can play again. Instrument Quality: 7/10 Oh dear. This is where your money is saved over the DTXtreme largely. The rack is made of aluminium with plastic joints and, while not flimsy at all, is no-where near as substantial as a real rack. Of course, it does make it significantly lighter and easier to handle, but it also just gives you that feeling of "not-quite top-quality". That said, it's not going to collapse on you or anything unless you're a moron and set it up all wonky. The plastic joints for the rack and the clamps to attach the pads to the rack are really the weak-points of this kit. I had to replace a pad clamp within about 9 months of buying this, as it completely snapped. Yamaha replaced it for free at least. I would see about getting a cheap steel rack if you can. The pads will fit into a standard cymbal clamp. Also of note is that, while all the pads are made of a very resilient high-quality rubber - and frankly I believe the quality of the cymbal pads to be superior to pretty much anything on the market - the snare uses the same pad as the toms. Given the sheer amount of abuse that it gets, this is Not A Good Idea™. At 11 months, the rubber in the centre of my snare is already beginning to show signs of wearing through. Needs a mesh snare, fo'sure. Also, the snare/ride pads are single-trigger, so if you want to be able to hit rim-shots or ride the bell, you need to buy a dual-zone pad. If you're wanting a dual-zone snare, it would be a perfect opperchancity to get a mesh pad instead. Playbility/Usability: 10/10 Not really much to say here. Everything... works. The only physical thing that needed tweaking was the high-hat pedal - at the default setup, you kinda need to welly it through the floor for it to work, but that's easily sorted by adjusting it with a drum-key. The brain is super-simple to operate while retaining quite the ability to be customised to a high degree. The control panel is just simply laid out very logically. Overall Value: 8.5/10 The default equipment shipped is about the same as you'd get with any standard kit, but only 2 cymbals was a bit short for me. The upside of this was that I could turn the floor tom into a ride until I got a 3rd cymbal (by which time I was used to the 2 toms and hooked on having more cymbals, so I just kept it that way). I also got myself a Big Dog double-bass pedal, but that's really a musical style thing. The Yamaha kick is decent enough. One has to be careful if ordering multiple extra pads, as I'm not sure what the limit is in the brain for the number of inputs it can handle. It defaults to 9, with the 9th not being used in the retail shipment. As for physical inputs, there are 8 in the brain which are all taken up with the retail shipped equipment. They are all 1/4" jacks. However, there is actually a socket in the back of the kick-drum (meaning that the signal is sent through the cable for the kick-drum - what an exceptionally weird place to put it!) which I used for my additional cymbal without any interference between it and the kick, making me think that since each normal pad is mono (stereo for dual-zone pads), you can probably get up to 18 triggers if you use splitters before the input. Really, apart from the lovely plastic clamps - which only become a problem when they break at least (it's not like they don't hold the pads properly) and you can get them swapped under warranty - and the cheap rack, the equipment that actually makes the sound is top quality. You could play them on your lap if you had to and mash it up in Ableton, it would still ultimately sound loving awesome. Good for beginners and more advanced players alike.
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Nov 10, 2009 04:38
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 14:50 |
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