Yamaha DTXpress/DTXplorer/DTXtreme

Hey, I never even noticed the referrence!!

Giles may say otherwise :) but I felt the gig went well.
Sound checking was hell, it took two days.
The DTXpress seems to give out different levels from the stereo outputs to the headphone jacks.
When I first kicked out a rythm I sunk the rest of the band in bass drum haze.
We had real problems getting the vocals up in the mix and I had to drop my bass drums down to half their volume!
I figure it was a mixture of the DTXpress and the house PA.

Worst problem for me was getting good mix back through my monitor.  I use real cymbals, so couldn't realy where headphones, although I had to have one ear in the cans to get the click from the external drum machine.

We didn't use the DTXpress as much as we had hoped, the gig hit us in a rush, two tracks had to be written in about four days when we found we'd lost the sample disk for two others! Organisation, someone should offer it mail order.

I was pretty dissapointed with our sound engineer overall, he had everything turned up to 10 to get that gut wrenching bass, but it just left no headroom.  I recon it should all have been pulled down a few decibells, but I realy should have mentioned it at the time, so my fault as much as anyones.

Overall though the biggest change was in what came out of the PA compared to what we had recorded previously.  We had thought of ourselves as progressive industrial thrash techno fusion, but on stage the extra power drowned out the subtle samples and backing tracks and left us with just industrial thrash, which we are not against at all, it rocked, in the old shool, loud and proud fashion.

Overall, the DTXpress has a few major shortcommings which you have to be aware of if using it live, first the output from the headphone socket isn't necesserily what you are going to get out of the stereo pair, the mix is all messed up.  Also be prepared to play with your settings to suit the house PA and venue.  Second, be very aware that the samples in the DTXpress have a wide range of volumes, some samples being significantly louder than others at the same midi volume.  When using multiple kits this can realy throw a sound engineer.  Best to pull down the loud samples to the level of the quietest allowing only a little variation in volume for emphasis from song to song.  I guess a compressor would have been useful here.

Basically, I figure we're all new to this high-tech aproach to live work ( the rest of the band are stage virgins and I'm an aging acoustic nut ) so we learnt the pitfalls of sample based stuff the hard way, well now we know, sort the levels before hitting the stage, simple, obvious, but unforgivable.

Hell, whatever anyone else says, we loved it, and a couple of guys from my other band gave us 6/10 "could do better" which I thought was bad, until I found out that they only rated our other band at 7/10 on the same scale ( my acoustic covers band rocks on stage, our regular crowd realy love us ) so I figure that wasn't bad at all for a first gig with all the crap flying.

And as for Geography, well, I'm based in the UK, Birmingham area.

If anyones interested though my other band "The Love Commandos" are doing a free gig at the Church Inn in Birmingham on the 29th Jan.  80's and 90's chart rock covers.  It's all just good fn, and free in, so if your local I expect to see you there.

Catch you guys later, good to see others building their own stuff onto the DTX base unit.

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From: 	vcrmac@...
Sent: 	20 January 2000 05:21
To: 	DTXpress@onelist.com
Subject: 	[DTXpress] Andy's Gig

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