Yamaha DTXpress/DTXplorer/DTXtreme

--- In DTXpress@yahoogroups.com, "mikeincamden" <mikeincamden@y...> 
wrote:
> Players
> 
> I got a DTXpress II for Xmas. What a wonderful invention! People 
who 
> did not play thirty years ago have no idea how we suffered with the 
> problem of noise. (Cue violins).
> 
> I've taped a piece of thin rubber to the wooden beater of my 
> Speedking in the hope of reducing wear on the kick pad rubber.
> 
> But is there an easy way to enable cymbal bell shots please? I 
> thought I saw a while back an illustration somewhere of a tiny 
cymbal 
> pad that mounted on top of one of the half-round cymbal pads but 
> maybe I dreamed it. Seems rather an odd omission the lack of cymbal 
> bell when it's so commonly used. I noticed the new three zone 
cymbal 
> pad soon being issued but what do people do at present?

Hi Mike,

Welcome to the group. The Yamaha bell attachment is called a PCY10. 
It can lie atop one of your cymbals or go on its own stand. It takes 
a separate input, normally 9 or 10, since it's not a stereo 
component. Yamaha's new three-sound cymbal PCY150 should be making 
its first appearance in a little more than a month. What people often 
do now for a bell, if they use a stereo cymbal from Yamaha, Pintech, 
or Roland, is to program it into the edge, though it's an odd place 
to be hitting a cymbal for a bell sound. An ingenious scheme that 
DTXpressI owners used was to velocity-crossfade a bell sound onto a 
mono cymbal. Because the old PCY80 had a tendency to increase 
velocity at the top of the cymbal near the wingnut, all they had to 
do was strike the cymbal (without any increase in velocity) near the 
top to get the bell--a nice coincidence. 

The other option is to use a true dual-zone cymbal (as opposed to 
stereo--see the archives), which normally requires a separate input 
for the bow and for the bell. Yamaha doesn't make such an animal, but 
other companies do. 

Ed