Yamaha DTXpress/DTXplorer/DTXtreme

Hello all, 

I just joined this group a few days ago and I think the group with all the
tips and discussion about the DTXpress kit is great. Please excuse this long
message. I'll try not to be so long winded in the future!

I'm a new drummer and I got my DTXpress IIIS kit a few weeks ago so I could
do silent practice. I have a cheap acoustic kit but my neighbors don't
really want to hear my banging away on the thing till all hours of the
morning, especially since I can't really play very well yet! I got myself a
good drum teacher who I see once a week and I hope I'll be able to bang out
some good rhythms soon.

I'd like to use the midi capabilities of the DTXpress IIIs kit so I can
record my drumming and create some midi music on my PC. I have a sequencer
program that I purchased way back a few years ago when I fooling around with
keyboards but it may not be working properly with my PC and the XP operating
system (it was written for Windows 98 back before XP was available). Since
my PC has an onboard soundcard with no joystick port, I could not use my
joystick port midi cable so I purchased a 'To Host' cable and hooked up my
DTXpress IIIs to a serial port on my PC and installed the CBX midi driver.
Everything seemed to work at first. I was able to do a Bulk Dump and Bulk
load to and from the DTX. I was also able to load all the kits available on
the DTXpressions site with no problem (thanks for the DTXchange program!). I
assumed, because I was able to do this that the 'To Host' cable was working
along with all the midi capabilities.

Here is my problem (I hope some of you techno brains out there can figure
this out for me!). When I load up a midi song into my sequencer (on the PC)
and then try to play it to the DTX, the drums do not play. After some
tweaking of some settings I was able to get the drums to play on channel 2
(I thought drums were always played on channel 10??). Today I could not get
the drums to play again and I discovered that they now played on channel 14!
After some more tweaking I cannot get the drums to play on any channel. By
the way the rest of the song plays OK with the correct midi sounds.

I have a program to monitor midi data and sure enough when I play the drums
on the DTX I get midi information on channel 10 but I cannot get the drums
to play back from my sequencer to the DTX.

I am thinking I may have a number of problems. #1 my 'To Host' cable is not
long enough so I am using a serial extension cable. I have read that the 'To
Host' cable should not be longer than 6 feet (with the extension, mine is
approximately 10 feet). #2 My sequencer software my not be working properly.
It was only a cheap program that was not meant to run on XP (Voyetra Midi
Orchestrator Plus) and #3 maybe I don't have some settings correct but I've
tried everything I can think of.

Can someone point me in the right direction? Is there some setting on the
DTX that I may be missing? Should I consider upgrading my software? Maybe I
need a proper midi adapter instead of the 'TO Host' cable?

If I was to get new software I was considering either Calkwalk Home Studio
or Cubasis VST. I just want to fool around a bit and I don't need high end
software.

Lastly, I have a keyboard with limited midi capabilities and would like to
use it for input to the sequencer. I assume I can use the midi IN and OUT on
the DTX and then thru the 'To Host' port to get the midi information from my
keyboard to the sequencer? I have already tried this and it appears to work
but I disconnected it when I started having the problems with the drums not
working.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

OK that's it. I'm done...no more long messages from me!

Thanks people!

Ken