Yamaha DTXpress/DTXplorer/DTXtreme

Thought I'd pass along this recent email conversation and see if 
anyone else can shed a little light......


"Was quering the DTXpress group for information on hooking the 
dtxpress module to a PC.  Noticed your questions were basically what 
I'm asking.  I'd like to hook my module up to my basic sound card 
(via game port) and it appears you wanted to do the same--i.e. use 
cakewalk and the sound module to lay down some tracks.

Were you succesful at getting the correct MIDI cable and figure out 
how to use cakewalk to sequence various voices from the dtxpress 
module?  If so, please briefly outline the steps you took.  I am an 
online teacher and am willing to build a small tutorial on getting 
this setup going but, of course, need to figure out how to get this 
going.  Once the tutorial is done I'd like to post the URL to the 
group--or just put it as a zip file in the "Files" section of the 
group." 


Sounds like you're wanting to do similar if not exactly what I was 
wanting to do...

You'll want to use the MIDI Out from the DTX.  NOT the 'Host' 
connection.  Sounds like for your set-up you'll need a cable with a 
male DIN connector on one end and a gameport type connector on the 
other. Try midicity.com.

At first I expected I was going to be able to take 'MIDI Out' from the 
DTX, record MIDI tracks to Cakewalk and then playback from the 
sequencer to the DTX 'MIDI In'.  The benifit would be: I'd be able to 
edit, quantize, etc the tracks in Cakewalk and then when playing back 
through the DTX brain, would still be able to select different kits, 
re-tune individual drums, etc.  Appearently Yamaha did not anticipate 
and facilitate this rather obvious application. The DTX brain doesn't 
naturally want to do this and you have to coax it with System 
Exclusive messages (and such voodoo) from Cakewalk.  That put it out 
of reach (or at least out of interest) for me.

However, I did work out a different system which uses the drum kits on 
my Yamaha SW60XG soundcard.  If your soundcard is just a basic FM 
synth card then you probably only have 1 drum kit (on Channel 10)  You 
~might~ have another one on Channel 16.  Starting with the first 10 
tracks clear in Cakewalk (ie put all other recorded parts on track 
numbers higher than 10) Go to Settings|Channel Table|and check the box 
'Record Events to Tracks by MIDI Channel' Fill in Channel 1 to Track 
1, Channel 2 to Track 2, etc. Then when you hit Record and play the 
DTX, Pad 1 will go to Track 1, Pad 2 to Track 2, etc.  However, ALL of 
the drum parts will be playing through Channel 10 of your soundcard.  
So, the bad news is that you cannot individually set Velocity, Pan, 
etc for each drum in the kit because any changes effect ALL the drum 
parts on Channel 10. You will however be able to edit (quantize, etc) 
the individual drum tracks in Cakewalk. In my case, with the SW60XG 
soundcard I've been using a program called XGedit to control the 
soundcard and it also has the capability to edit the individual drum 
parts within the soundcard Channel. One quirk I ran into is that I 
have to 'refresh' the synth after each time I touch anything on the 
DTX brain.  Otherwise I get Piano (General MIDI voice #1) sounds when 
I play the DTX pads. I think what happens when I 'refresh' the synth 
(using a button in XGedit) is that it sends a SysEx message to the DTX 
brain.  There may not be a way to do that with your basic soundcard.  

That being said, FM synth cards like yours and wavetable synth cards 
like the SW60XG are about to go the way of the dinosaurs.  Soft Synths 
are rapidly taking their place.  I am just about to get into soft 
synths and it looks like that system may help facilitate the process 
we were talking about above. We'll see..

In the meantime if you can coax anyone at the DTX forum to talk in 
more detail about how they are driving the DTX brain with their 
sequencer, I'd love to hear about it.  One of the problems in these 
things is that everybody's set-up is different so it's hard to get too 
specific with instructions.

good luck

Hoop