Yamaha electronic drums are a market leader, and there are some good reasons why that's so. Yamaha was already a powerful force in the acoustic drum business when electronic drums started to become popular in the late 1980's and early 90's, and they decided to go after the electric drum market with a vengance, directing a huge amount of resources toward an attempt to dominate the emerging market.
Yamaha used their position in the industry to bring world class drummers together with the best recording engineers in the business. In this way, they were able to incorporate thousands of the highest quality samples into the modules of their electronic drums. Yamaha electronic drums were also the beneficiary of a lot of research directed towards advancing the state of the art technology, as electronic drum kits went from being able to merely approximate the sound of an electronic drum, to being able to perfectly reproduce that sound, in additon to storing the sounds of hundreds of different samples, allowing you to pretty much have the equivalent of hundreds of different drum sets in your Yamaha electronic drums.
The line of Yamaha electronic drums consists of three main series:
The entry level range is called the DTXplorer. Don't let the 'entry level' moniker scare you away, however. What Yamaha calls entry level is feature laden, including a snare pad, kick pad, three tom pads, two cymbal pads and a hi hat. It comes standard with 214 voices, 32 factory programmed kits, and 10 user kits that allow you to create any custom kit you need or want. It also includes a great learning tool for beginning drummers, the Groove Check with Rhythm Gate. When engaged, the Rhythm Gate will mute the drums if you play out of time. Once you get back in time, the drums are unmuted.
The DTXpress is the mid-level offering in the Yamaha electronic drums line. The number of pre-programmed kits increases from 32 to 50, and includes 427 different drum samples, and you have the capability of creating 20 of your own unique kits. Also, the DTXpress lets you allocate 22 different keyboard sounds to the drum pads. Just think of the mind-boggling effects you could create with this. Another great feature offered by this kit are the multi-zone pads, which allow different areas of the pads to be assigned different sounds, so now a rim shot on the snare drum becomes possible on the same pad that produces the normal snare sound. The DTXpress also allows you to record your performance, and gives you 44 prerecorded, 19 pad, and 20 user-generated songs to play along with. Of course, you can always plug into the AUX IN and play along with any of your favorite songs.
The top of the Yamaha electronic drums line offering is the ever-so-aptly named DTXtreme. Many feel that this is the primo electronic drum kit on the market. The DTXtreme give you 50 pre-programmed drum kits, 50 custom user kits and more than 1000 samples! It also comes with the multi-zone pads with 3 three zone tom pads, 1 three zone snare pad, 1 three zone cymbal pad, one three zone ride cymbal pad, one hi hat pad and a kick drum and pedal. A cool thing with this kit is that the the hi hat moves up and down like the traditional version. They've also made it so the cymbals are silenced when you pinch the edge, just like acoustics. Now, nobody's about to call the price of the DTXtreme 'cheap', but if you want to get the absolute best in electronic drum kits and you've got the financial resources, this is the one!
If you've made the decision to go electronic, then you have to give careful consideration to Yamaha electronic drums. As an industry leader, they offer a kit for everyone, from rank beginner to world class musician. You'd be doing yourself a great favor by taking a look at their offerings today!
Tags: DTXplorer, DTXpress, DTXtreme, yamaha electronic drums
