DTX and Cakewalk
2002-02-10 by hoopertoones
Thought I'd pass along this recent email conversation and see if anyone else can shed a little light...... "Was quering the DTXpress group for information on hooking the dtxpress module to a PC. Noticed your questions were basically what I'm asking. I'd like to hook my module up to my basic sound card (via game port) and it appears you wanted to do the same--i.e. use cakewalk and the sound module to lay down some tracks. Were you succesful at getting the correct MIDI cable and figure out how to use cakewalk to sequence various voices from the dtxpress module? If so, please briefly outline the steps you took. I am an online teacher and am willing to build a small tutorial on getting this setup going but, of course, need to figure out how to get this going. Once the tutorial is done I'd like to post the URL to the group--or just put it as a zip file in the "Files" section of the group." Sounds like you're wanting to do similar if not exactly what I was wanting to do... You'll want to use the MIDI Out from the DTX. NOT the 'Host' connection. Sounds like for your set-up you'll need a cable with a male DIN connector on one end and a gameport type connector on the other. Try midicity.com. At first I expected I was going to be able to take 'MIDI Out' from the DTX, record MIDI tracks to Cakewalk and then playback from the sequencer to the DTX 'MIDI In'. The benifit would be: I'd be able to edit, quantize, etc the tracks in Cakewalk and then when playing back through the DTX brain, would still be able to select different kits, re-tune individual drums, etc. Appearently Yamaha did not anticipate and facilitate this rather obvious application. The DTX brain doesn't naturally want to do this and you have to coax it with System Exclusive messages (and such voodoo) from Cakewalk. That put it out of reach (or at least out of interest) for me. However, I did work out a different system which uses the drum kits on my Yamaha SW60XG soundcard. If your soundcard is just a basic FM synth card then you probably only have 1 drum kit (on Channel 10) You ~might~ have another one on Channel 16. Starting with the first 10 tracks clear in Cakewalk (ie put all other recorded parts on track numbers higher than 10) Go to Settings|Channel Table|and check the box 'Record Events to Tracks by MIDI Channel' Fill in Channel 1 to Track 1, Channel 2 to Track 2, etc. Then when you hit Record and play the DTX, Pad 1 will go to Track 1, Pad 2 to Track 2, etc. However, ALL of the drum parts will be playing through Channel 10 of your soundcard. So, the bad news is that you cannot individually set Velocity, Pan, etc for each drum in the kit because any changes effect ALL the drum parts on Channel 10. You will however be able to edit (quantize, etc) the individual drum tracks in Cakewalk. In my case, with the SW60XG soundcard I've been using a program called XGedit to control the soundcard and it also has the capability to edit the individual drum parts within the soundcard Channel. One quirk I ran into is that I have to 'refresh' the synth after each time I touch anything on the DTX brain. Otherwise I get Piano (General MIDI voice #1) sounds when I play the DTX pads. I think what happens when I 'refresh' the synth (using a button in XGedit) is that it sends a SysEx message to the DTX brain. There may not be a way to do that with your basic soundcard. That being said, FM synth cards like yours and wavetable synth cards like the SW60XG are about to go the way of the dinosaurs. Soft Synths are rapidly taking their place. I am just about to get into soft synths and it looks like that system may help facilitate the process we were talking about above. We'll see.. In the meantime if you can coax anyone at the DTX forum to talk in more detail about how they are driving the DTX brain with their sequencer, I'd love to hear about it. One of the problems in these things is that everybody's set-up is different so it's hard to get too specific with instructions. good luck Hoop