Whow i see nobody has posted here yet so here goes....

I've recently visited the Yamaha Web site looking for info on their digital piano range and stumbled across their new Digital Drums section. I have played on a couple of their earlier models some 20 years ago and thought they sounded and felt rubbish but then i watched with awe the video demo of the new Yamaha DD65 and thought how far they have come since my first experience with a drum machine.

Has anybody else tried the new DD65? I see that you can play it like a real drum kit with the pads positioned in such a way that the feel is very much like playing an acoustic kit. Their are two upgrade pedals which give you the real hardware for hi-hat and bass pedals and the sound is very convincing. Loved the chill out Indian percussion set. I can see some very useful applications for this new model.

Well, there have been posts here before... But ages ago so the threads got deleted, which makes us seem worse than we actually are! Thanks Mods! Lol...



Anyway... I haven't seen the DD65 before, but from the sound of it you're talking about an electronic drum kit, rather than a drum machine...

I have played on the Yamaha DTX edrums before and thought they were quite responsive and the samples were good... Not sure if they have new samples but last year all the Yamaha drum samples (I think!) had been recorded by Paul Brook, an amazing drummer and brilliant teacher whom I was privileged to know before his death earlier this year...

Anyway... I thought that the Roland V-Drums were actually better than the Yamaha DTX series... Not much better, mind, but a little bit... There are also Alesis and Hart edrum kits and the market for these kits is expanding rapidly...

What I'm really hoping to get is a Zendrum (see www.zendrum.com) and a Rolansd SPD-S module to play it through, but that won't be for a few years yet!!

The topic of edrums is an interesting one - a lot of parents think that they're a good bet for their beginnner children because of the facility for headphones, but I am of the opinion that, like the piano and the electronic keyboard, adrums and edrums are two different instruments... Admittedly there's a lot of overlap but essentially they are different kettles of marine life... I have a couple of pupils who learn on an ekit atm... They are hoping to to get an akit eventually, so I teach them in a similar way to my other pupils, in a way "preparing" them for the transition over to an akit... If they actually wanted to be ekit drummers the teaching methods and the excersises would be different...

Ideally, a drummer should be able to play both adrums and edrums... Craig Blundell, an excellent clinician and session drummer, does a lot of demonstrations on Roland V-Drums, as well and playing clinics and gigs on his akit, whilst Japanese drummer Akira Jimbo has an ordinary akit which has edrum pads and triggers attached to it, so that he can play both at once - I saw Akira Jimbo playing live at DrummerLive 2006 and he played entire songs (ie drums, bass, guitars, piano, vocals etc) just on his drum kit by playing, singing and triggering different samples from electronic pads on the kit, all done live... That was a very good show!!

I hope that's answered what you were asking... Well, it hasn't coz I haven't seen the particular model to which you referred, but hopefully I've been of some help!