Just bought a Yamaha DTXM12 and here is my initial thoughts...
I have a full acoustic kit for gigs and a matching Roland kit for quiet practise but I was looking for a really portable kit for practising quietly, jamming or small gigs where a full acoustic kit/electric kit would not be practical or appropriate. The main two options available were the Yamaha DTXM12 or the Roland SPD30. I chose the Yamaha because I wanted the 12 staggered pads rather than the Roland's flat eight and I could get the DTXM12 with stand, case and two pedals for the same price as the SPD30 alone.
I set up the kit out of the box, screwed on the adapter and attached it to the stand, plugged the hi-hat controller (HH40) and bass drum pedal (KD100) into the back and turned it on and started hitting pads. First thing I did was test out every pad in all 50 preset kits. First thing I realised was that the vast majority of these kits are combinations of world percussion sounds, electronic drum sounds and sound effects. There was only really two drum kits that sounded anything like I could use as an instant drum kit replacement, these were the Oak Custom (009) and Hipgig kit (049). The Oak custom is a solid sounding kit you could use for rock or funk, the Hipgig would work for jazz or pop etc. The default layout of the pads is a little weird and is obviously that way as it is set up to work without any pedals. So the cymbals are on the top row of bars: Crash, Splash and Ride. The toms are on the top row of the main pads: High, Medium and Low. The bass, snare and hi-hat are on the bottom row of the main pads: Bass, Snare and Hi-Hat (Closed). On the bottom row of bars is a loud bass drum, a rim-shot and a hi-hat edge. The bass drum pedal worked by default into input 14/15 and the hi-hat pedal opened and closed the hi-hat edge on bar 12, but not the main hi-hat on pad 9. However the bass drum pedal was very quiet and although the hi-hat opened and closed when I hit bar 12, it only made a very feint sound when I closed it. The other main issue was the strength you needed to hit the pads with in order to trigger the sounds and the feel of the pads themselves. It seemed to be set up for a heavy hitter - possibly using the pad to extend the sounds of an acoustic kit etc.
Firstly the pads are not hard like on an Octapad or other rubber drum pad, they are quite soft and this means you don't get much stick bounce from them - softer strokes and quiet double stroke rolls simply didn't trigger any sounds and you had to hit the bars much harder than the main pads to trigger them. So obviously all I need to do is adjust the sensitivity of the pads and pedals so they trigger at my desired playing level - simples...
No it isn't...
This is perhaps the biggest negative about the DTXM12 - if it's default settings don't suit your playing style and/or musical tastes the menu system is incredibly complicated, unintuitive and the manual really doesn't help that much. This is further complicated by the fact that there are several different places where you can edit/change the volume/triggering sensitivity and some of these affect or override the other settings. I am not new to electronic drums, drum machines and sequencers, but even with years of experience it took me probably 3-4 hours to get the triggering/volume of one single kit to a playable state. This involved telling the DTXM12 what kind of pedals I was using and then tweaking the triggering sensitivity of each pad/pedal as well as the overall sensitivity and volume. In the end I found that setting the system sensitivity to 'hand' or 'finger' allowed me to play gently and still trigger the sounds reliably. However, I still found that I had to hit the bars harder than the main pads and this was causing big volume spikes in the cymbal sounds and the pedal were still too quiet. Eventually I decided to set a fixed velocity for the cymbals (lower) and pedals (higher) which gave me a fairly balanced sound overall. As I said though there are 5 or 6 different places to tweak the sensitivity and volume of the system, kit and individual pads - and although this means you can have a completely different set up for every kit if you want to it is far too complicated in my opinion. Then I decided I wanted to make the pad 9 hi-hat sound open and close in the same way the bar 12 hi-hat edge did. This took about another hour - the secret being that in order for this to work you have to assign the closed and open sound to two different layers on the same pad e.g. A&C or B&D - and set the hi-hat pedal function to match. This is further complicated by the fact that there are two different ways or stages to setting a sound - you can assign a sample to a pad and/or assign a midi note to a pad (and possibly a sample to a midi note - still haven't quite got my head around that).
So after 4 hours of pulling what little of my hair I have left out I finally had a playable kit - I then changed some of the sounds/samples on each pad - which is actually quite simple as it should be - I opted for a standard ride on pad 6 with the bell sound on bar 3, with two crashes on bar 1 and 2. High tom and mid tom on pads 4 and 5, snare on pad 7, floor tom on pad 8, hi-hat on pad 9 and then rim shot, cowbell and hi-hat edge on bars 10,11 and 12. Of course you have to remember to store your changes otherwise they will be lost when you change kits or turn the unit off...
Next step was to download and install the extra acoustic kits available from the Yamaha website - this was straight-forward enough and the instructions were clear. There are four kits, each with five variations. They are high quality samples which take up most of the available user memory. However, the variations are simply the original kit tuned up, down or a combination of both and to be honest they sound rubbish, although the original kit sounds and samples are usable but I will want to mix and match different elements. I couldn't face trying to adjust the triggering and volume levels on these kits, hopefully there will be a way to copy my settings to a new kit (fingers crossed).
I have only just scratched the surface of what the DTXM12 does though - you can edit individual samples, record and sequence patterns, play loops and tuned instruments like piano or bass etc - so it is incredibly powerful, just not easy to set up as a simple drumkit - if you have no experience of electronic drums, drum machines and sequencers - then stay away you will lose the will to live...
I have since discovered that there is an app for Ipads called the DTX Touch that provides a much easier graphical interface for editing the kits and I am planning to give this a go tonight - probably developed because of the issues high-lighted above. I will post back my finding here in a few days. I am not looking for a huge variety of sounds or kits, I would just like one solid kit that I can play regularly, and if there are one or two variations for different styles then that would be a bonus.
