Yamaha DTXpress/DTXplorer/DTXtreme

Stephen; I guess Im getting kind of old for the technology.
  As you heard with the songs I have posted I am constantly 
struggling with getting better sound and tone recorded . I've been 
using Sonar for about a year and I thought I had it down pretty well 
until this Midi experience. I consider myself to be pretty computer 
savy and make my living in electronics dealing with computer systems 
as well as computer operated equipment. believe it or not! I am also 
one of those who is driven to succeed when I cant get something to 
work, but I have to say that MIDI is the most poorly documented and 
obviously difficult to grasp areas I have have ever encountered. 
  The explainations are a jumble of engineering terms and not a how 
to, so its difficult to get the big picture.

I spent another 3 grueling hours today trying to get these things 
configured and even with your assistance and files,having almost the 
same system,Im still getting bad snare and kick sounds in most patch 
kits but not all as I did before.(only general midi worked before)

 I know that this is matter of one or two settings somewhere but Im 
exausted. theres got to be 1000 places to make a mistake in the 
communication configuration. Im going to try to read through all the 
midi documentation in both sonar and the dtxpress in the next week 
or so and maybe Ill come up with the answer.Perhaps Ill call the so 
called midi guru at yamaha again. Once I get it working we can try 
to improve it and have a drum set that we can record to midi in 
sonar so we can manipulate it to sound like good drummers with good 
drum setups :) ahhh that would be nice.

  Actually I bought this setup thinking that it would be compatible 
and all I had to do follow the instructions. Its hard to believe 
that yamaha does not address this issue and provide decent 
documentation so that these midi drums can be utilized with the most 
popular recording software.  There is a lot of power in the unit but 
it is wasted if its not usable by the end user.

Then again theres not a lot of people who are giving any advice for 
the dtx as far as midi goes.

Once again I applaud your conquering the beast for yourself, That is 
no small accomplishment. There is probably some genius 17 year old 
out there that can do everything we need in a jiffy but how can I 
find him?

I may post a step by step of every one of the involved settings when 
I recover from my mental hernia :)
perhaps then you can recognize if we are set up the same.

Peace and prosperity to you
Bill

--- In DTXpress@yahoogroups.com, "Stephen Beaumont" <SJB@I...> wrote:
> Bill, feel free to try the attached sysEx file which is what I to 
> set everything in the DTXpress. I made the file by setting all the 
> parameters in DTX then dumping it to Sonar and saving it as a 
file. 
> Then I load the file using the "load from file" option in the 
Sonar 
> SysEx view and send the info back to the DTX by pressing the "send 
> bank" arrow. I usually then set the sysEx to load automatically 
each 
> time I open the file - there in an option in the SysEx section 
> somewhere to let you do this.
> 
> Of course the parameters I set may not be exactly what you need, 
but 
> I know you have to have the local MIDI off, for example, and also 
> set the DTX to receive SysEx. You can make your own sysEX in the 
same fashion should this file not do what you need. Anyway, this 
works on my setup, so good luck!
> 
> I checked out your singles on nowhereradio.com. Some nice sounding 
> work there :) My interest is composing background music mainly for 
> interactive CD-ROMs. Nothing posted as yet, but some day I may get 
> around to it. I am a keyboard player, not a drummer, but hated 
> trying to make the drum parts sound realistic by inputting from a 
> keyboard, or worse yet, using pre made loops. Have only had the 
DTX 
> a few months and love playing with it. I need to improve my 
> technique a lot, however and it annoys me I have had to spend so 
> much time on getting it to actually work....anyway, good luck with 
> the SysEx. Let me know how it goes.
> 
> Stephen