[vladmir]

Dude… the idea is you buy it if you like it after the demo. There are ways around everything, but that it considered to be ‘unauthorized use’… especially by the guys who feed their families by working on it for a living and providing you the privilege of test-driving it. Do you just re-key a car after you test drive it? Are you so destitute you can afford your internet connection and the surfing device but you can’t help the toontrack folk feed their families by buying a license? These folk make a nice product for a reasonable price…

[vladmir]

What a newbee. I see the question was EZD, not SD2. I bought SD2 to map the pesky DM10X and its goofy non-std midi implementation. Next time I will buy Yamaha, but for the money the Alesis is nice. Sounds like you have spent $150 in time, might as well get SD2 and have the cadilac!

[vladmir]

I bought the Alesis DM10X a few months back, then I started working in Cubase and I had all kinds of midi issues. I have been playing drums for 40 years, gave up on midi in the C64 days, got Roland edrums in 93 and promptly bashed out all the sensors and said, “enough of the edrums”.

Being a computer engineer of 30 years recently figured the time was right to give it another try thinking all the issues are surely worked out and of course found out the contrary, especially with the Alesis. Midi config & mapping was the obvious issue since I learned Alesis has a non-standard (proprietary) midi implementation. What? Alesis was a questionable choice but it was made so I had to fix it since they couldn’t and would not even respond to inquiry. No more Alesis products for me.

I knew my best shot was SD2 since midi mapping was obviously the problem with Alesis and SD2 had a beautiful set of midi tools and sounds. First, I have read that there is supposedly an ‘Alesis’ option in SD2 (I have the latest – 2.4) but I don’t have it in mine so here is what I did:

My first and most complex issue was the Hi-Hat mapping so I tried the Yamaha, no go. Then I tried Roland and the Hi-hat worked!!!! Now the most complex problem was solved!

From here it was just basic mapping. I went into the DM10 and wrote down all the midi notes of each of the sensors and the rims. Then I went into SD2 mapping and entered them as well as deleting any existing mapping. I added 2 xdrum cymbals just so I could have the kit visually representative of my layout because I have tom1 rim as tom1 and the rest of the rims as extra cymbals.

I had to tweak some crosstalk and the only remaining issue is the ride bell which I believe is a problem on my ride sensor since it always seemed less than optimally sensitive and is actually sending different notes than the DM10 module says.

Bottom line is I am pretty happy with the mapping and now I am ready for some SDx’s.

[Author]

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