Im' sure I'll catch a lot of shit for this, but here goes.
Back in 1998, when I bought my first digital studio (had always had analog until then and a building for recording), I found myself in a bad situtation. My studio is in my house and I have neighbors now
and one is a cop. So how do I solve this one. Okay, I'll run everything direct. No amps, but what about the drums.
Our drummer has been playing for 30 years on acoustics. We couldn't set up his drums and have him pounding away at 2 in the morning. I happened to be looking at a mf catalog and saw
the yamaha dd50 digital drum pads. For 240 bucks, I thought, what the hell, I'll buy them for our drummer and see what he thinks.
Well, when he saw this thing setting in front of him he just laughed and said YOU GOT TO BE KIDDING. Of course, i said, NO I'M NOT KIDDING. Just try them. Well, he could not believe the sound that came out. Neither could the rest of the band. I bought another to set up with just percussion sounds. They really did work. Even fooled other drummers when they heard our CD. Next we went to yamaha dtexpress kit. Even though this was a real full digital drum kit, our drummer liked the sound of the pads better. We now use the new
yamaha dd55 pads. They are really great sounding and solved the noise problem with the neighbors and there is no noise on the recordings. The only bad thing about them is that you can only store one user setup kit.
Anyway, there it is. Now everyone can tell me how full of shit I am and that there is no way in hell this could be. All I can say to that is, Okay.