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About 20 minutes ago I put the sticks down after a 10-to-15-minute session on the DTXtreme.
I walk into the Arlington Hts., IL, Guitar Center and a salesman is just finishing up setting up the kit. He's putting those little security attachments on. First: The kit looks gorgeous. They have it adjacent to their Roland kits and the contrast is incredible. Rolands look more like toys next to this thing. The kit had the 4 snare/tom pads, the upright kick trigger, a circular (PD-7-like) hi-hat trigger pad, and two of the rubber wedge-cymbal triggers, plus the hi-hat controller and a generic bass drum pedal.
Salesman gets me a pair of sticks and brushes, and I go to town:
Impressions:
1) They are poor imitators of acoustic drums in comparison to the Rolands. I was brought back to the days of my TD-7, with the machine-gun samples very evident on the toms. Absolutely no progress here. If you demo the kit yourself try the Orchestral kit; the toms are all timpani sounds. Do some rolls on those and you'll see what I mean -- there is a distinct and ugly clipping as the samples come and go. The same general impression was elicited from the snare, but if you hone your technique you can carry off a press roll adequately. Still, the Rolands are superior.
2) The drum samples are fairly banal, in my opinion. This is the acoustic-kit sounds, I mean. I scrolled through every kit, playing some more than others, but the acoustic-kit stuff left me a little empty. The kits tend to have little variety between them. Though some complain about the Roland drum sounds, I think Roland's sounds have character, even if they do not exactly imitate acoustic drums I find that they have a particular identity, and I like that. Yamaha's are a little boring.
3) Cymbal sounds are good, certainly better than the tom sounds, and fairly comparable to Roland on an interface level. Again, they lack character, I thought, with few distinct voices. I did not try swells or rolls on the cymbals, sorry, I should have.
4) Thought the hi-hat pedal and pad did not track evenly on some kits. Also, on many kits, the sounds of the pedal were significantly different from the pad sounds, as if two different sets of high hats are being used. This could be one of those demo-kit-salesman-setup things. Since it was just set up it might need some tweaking.
5) The crash wedge had a neat choking effect: if you hit the pad and press the stick against the 'rim', it chokes the sound, allowing for a one-handed choke technique. Very nice, though the choking sounds a bit clipped -- Rolands do also, however.
6) Excellent ethnic percussion sounds. This may not mean a whole lot to y'all, but I'm a big world music fan and I was very impressed. A lot of neat, non-cheesy ethnic stuff metal sounds, hand-drum sounds.
7) Modern electronic sounds, though no 808/909-quality stuff. Some electronic effects were neat. These kits had a lot of sequences and layering assigned to the pads so it was difficult to distinguish between those and the samples. Many of the kits were named VFX-1, VFX-2 or whatever which I think refers to Tony Verderosa, so I suppose if your a fan of his you'll dig some of these kits.
8) ALL RIMS ARE SEPARATELY TRIGGERABLE! This means all toms. All the kits I tried, however, had only one sound from the snare rim -- no crosstick/rimshot X-fade as in the TD-10 exp.
9) Found the pads to be quite noisy. Probably an issue with many of you, as with me. I didn't like the feel, but I am a fan of mesh pads so my opinion is biased. The salesman said that you can remove the backs of the pads and insert some kind of foam which would reduce noise. It felt like there was some baffling material in there already -- certainly it wasn't open under the head. I'm not sure how well-versed he was about that.
10) The two factory brush kits had no snare drum 'sweep/swish' ability. On kit the brush-snare sound was a long swish; I think the idea is that this sound keeps repeating as you swish around the drumhead and repeatedly trigger it. Unconvincing. The other brush kit merely had a brush slap when you hit, no sweep effects.
11) I don't recall there being any hot spot problems.
Some things to keep in mind:
I only had a limited time to play, and there are a lot of factory kits. There were 90, I think, so I couldn't explore any one kit with ample thoroughness. Also, I did no tweaking, I only scrolled from kit to kit and played. Listened via headphones; didn't pay attention to the model so I can't be sure how good they were. Again, I sat down as the salesman finished setting up, so this was a cold, fresh out-of-the-box, non-tweaked kit (IMHO Rolands are impressive straight from the box). My musical tastes may vary from yours -- I'm strictly a basement-bangin' hobbyist with tastes a little out of the mainstream. I'm not looking for a piece of equipment to help me earn a living, those of you pro's will probably be looking for other factors.
DJourg
[This message has been edited by DJourg (edited February 05, 2001).]
I walk into the Arlington Hts., IL, Guitar Center and a salesman is just finishing up setting up the kit. He's putting those little security attachments on. First: The kit looks gorgeous. They have it adjacent to their Roland kits and the contrast is incredible. Rolands look more like toys next to this thing. The kit had the 4 snare/tom pads, the upright kick trigger, a circular (PD-7-like) hi-hat trigger pad, and two of the rubber wedge-cymbal triggers, plus the hi-hat controller and a generic bass drum pedal.
Salesman gets me a pair of sticks and brushes, and I go to town:
Impressions:
1) They are poor imitators of acoustic drums in comparison to the Rolands. I was brought back to the days of my TD-7, with the machine-gun samples very evident on the toms. Absolutely no progress here. If you demo the kit yourself try the Orchestral kit; the toms are all timpani sounds. Do some rolls on those and you'll see what I mean -- there is a distinct and ugly clipping as the samples come and go. The same general impression was elicited from the snare, but if you hone your technique you can carry off a press roll adequately. Still, the Rolands are superior.
2) The drum samples are fairly banal, in my opinion. This is the acoustic-kit sounds, I mean. I scrolled through every kit, playing some more than others, but the acoustic-kit stuff left me a little empty. The kits tend to have little variety between them. Though some complain about the Roland drum sounds, I think Roland's sounds have character, even if they do not exactly imitate acoustic drums I find that they have a particular identity, and I like that. Yamaha's are a little boring.
3) Cymbal sounds are good, certainly better than the tom sounds, and fairly comparable to Roland on an interface level. Again, they lack character, I thought, with few distinct voices. I did not try swells or rolls on the cymbals, sorry, I should have.
4) Thought the hi-hat pedal and pad did not track evenly on some kits. Also, on many kits, the sounds of the pedal were significantly different from the pad sounds, as if two different sets of high hats are being used. This could be one of those demo-kit-salesman-setup things. Since it was just set up it might need some tweaking.
5) The crash wedge had a neat choking effect: if you hit the pad and press the stick against the 'rim', it chokes the sound, allowing for a one-handed choke technique. Very nice, though the choking sounds a bit clipped -- Rolands do also, however.
6) Excellent ethnic percussion sounds. This may not mean a whole lot to y'all, but I'm a big world music fan and I was very impressed. A lot of neat, non-cheesy ethnic stuff metal sounds, hand-drum sounds.
7) Modern electronic sounds, though no 808/909-quality stuff. Some electronic effects were neat. These kits had a lot of sequences and layering assigned to the pads so it was difficult to distinguish between those and the samples. Many of the kits were named VFX-1, VFX-2 or whatever which I think refers to Tony Verderosa, so I suppose if your a fan of his you'll dig some of these kits.
8) ALL RIMS ARE SEPARATELY TRIGGERABLE! This means all toms. All the kits I tried, however, had only one sound from the snare rim -- no crosstick/rimshot X-fade as in the TD-10 exp.
9) Found the pads to be quite noisy. Probably an issue with many of you, as with me. I didn't like the feel, but I am a fan of mesh pads so my opinion is biased. The salesman said that you can remove the backs of the pads and insert some kind of foam which would reduce noise. It felt like there was some baffling material in there already -- certainly it wasn't open under the head. I'm not sure how well-versed he was about that.
10) The two factory brush kits had no snare drum 'sweep/swish' ability. On kit the brush-snare sound was a long swish; I think the idea is that this sound keeps repeating as you swish around the drumhead and repeatedly trigger it. Unconvincing. The other brush kit merely had a brush slap when you hit, no sweep effects.
11) I don't recall there being any hot spot problems.
Some things to keep in mind:
I only had a limited time to play, and there are a lot of factory kits. There were 90, I think, so I couldn't explore any one kit with ample thoroughness. Also, I did no tweaking, I only scrolled from kit to kit and played. Listened via headphones; didn't pay attention to the model so I can't be sure how good they were. Again, I sat down as the salesman finished setting up, so this was a cold, fresh out-of-the-box, non-tweaked kit (IMHO Rolands are impressive straight from the box). My musical tastes may vary from yours -- I'm strictly a basement-bangin' hobbyist with tastes a little out of the mainstream. I'm not looking for a piece of equipment to help me earn a living, those of you pro's will probably be looking for other factors.
DJourg
[This message has been edited by DJourg (edited February 05, 2001).]
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