Worship Musician MayJun 2017 | Page 42

GEARREVIEW BY CARL ALBRECHT Yamaha DT50K & DT50S Drum Triggers and toms. The dual trigger feature allows you the snare trigger might react to hard hits on KEY FEATURES to add separate sounds to the rims or accented the toms. Softer playing never gave me any Quick Set Up samples of the same instrument. Be as creative issues. For the harder playing I just tweaked the Dual Trigger Features as you like. I tested the two on the kick and settings enough to avoid the problem of false Plays Well with Other Systems several snares in my studio for this review. triggering… And I was good to go. I followed the easy instructions for a quick For live events when I just want to add similar set up. Clamping the triggers to the rims was or same samples of the drum being triggered The new drum triggers just released by Yamaha a simple process. No surprises there… Then I actually like a bit of cross talk between the Corporation proves once again that Yamaha is running the cables to the interface was a drums because it feels more real to me. That’s always on the forefront of new drum technology breeze. Be sure the dual snare trigger plugs a personal choice… you can do what works whether it’s acoustic or electronic drum designs. into a dual input or you’ll need to split the signal for you. If the sample is meant to be clearly The DT50K trigger is for the bass (kick) drum via a stereo to two mono patch cable. The a special effect I’ll make it cleaner… such as and the DT50S is a dual trigger for the snare look of the triggers is pretty cool too. I love the adding a tambourine or clap sample to the chrome-plated casing… very classy and sleek. snare on different sections of a song. So this gets two thumbs up for me. For studio production work we often layer or If you use the DTX series digital drums Yamaha trigger sounds in post-production editing. has firmware updates for the DTX modules that With triggers I can actually give a producer or include the new DT50K/S trigger settings to engineer the option to hear samples as part of make it easy for set up. For this test I actually the tracking session. This can be very inspiring. used an older Yamaha sound module and then Again it’s all a matter of personal choices and another drum pad just to see how the triggers the creative process. The one thing with any would act with non-matching manufacturers. trigger is that there can always be a slight In this case it was a Roland SPD-20. An older millisecond delay in the sampled sound being model yes, but still capable of all the tweaking activated by the trigger. In live settings this is needed to work well with these triggers. Actually something we really can’t hear unless there there was not much tweaking needed because is an actual problem with the sound being the Yamaha triggers just worked perfectly. sampled. This rarely happens. In the studio when you see the sounds on top of each other Of course depending on your style of playing “in the digital grid” you might see the slight you may need to adjust things like sensitivity delay. But, I don’t recommend being too quick and threshold levels to “fix” what you think is a problem. Use your to avoid cross talk ears, and if the sound seems off, you can move from other drums. the sampled track until it lines up perfectly… I purposely played Or until you think it sounds right. That is also a extremely creative choice. see hard how to much volume would cause The Yamaha triggers performed greatly for this the triggers to react. test and I salute the Yamaha design team for The DT50K trigger once again bringing great tools to the drumming on the kick never community. Salute! Carl false triggered when I was slamming the snare and toms. There were a few moments 42 May  Jun 2017 where STREET PRICE $89.99, either model CONTACT usa.Yamaha.com WorshipMusician.com