Yamaha DTXpress/DTXplorer/DTXtreme

Personally, I find it hard to believe that when challenged to put up 
or shut up, we've all decided to shut up. As Brian LaRue jokingly 
remarked today in reaction to the resounding indifference shown thus 
far to his call for ideas, "Everyone must be completely happy about 
everyhing that e-drum companies produce." I humbly submit instead 
that although we're happy that e-drum manufacturers are making 
products, we aren't necessarily content with all of their choices or 
with all of their methods of implementing them. No one's promising 
that Pintech is going to make whatever we want. But if a particular 
suggestion happens to strike a chord with consumers, as well as with 
Brian and his team, it could very well see the light of day. You 
don't have to be a technician to come up with a viable idea. You only 
have to be able to take stock of those moments behind the kit when 
something does not seem to be as easy, as accurate, or as imaginative 
as it could be (not to mention as inexpensive as it could be). 

The machine-gun effect has recently come under fire on this board, 
and for good reason. How hard would it be to create a module that 
reduces it without costing (or offering) as much as the Roland TD-20? 
Are module ergonomics as good as they could be? Personally, I find 
the DTXpress module a little hard to operate. The discontinued 
DTXv2.0 and DTXtreme were a lot easier. Granted, they were more 
expensive, but what would we sacrifice inside the module to get a 
better display to read and program (the DTXpress text editor will 
alleviate some of the problem, but not everybody always, if ever, has 
a PC nearby). While we're on that subject, what about leaving out 
some of the user songs and other extras on a module to create more 
memory for samples? What about a new trigger-to-MIDI interface with 
more inputs than the TMC-6, at a cost below that of a second new 
module or a set of features more current than an older module?

I'll let Brian make the offer again personally, which he said that 
he'd like to do, but I hope that we can generate some discussion on 
the board about this subject, because people actually do have a lot 
of ideas, complaints, and suggestions. Let's put them in one place.

Ed