Yamaha DD65

I own a DrumKat 3.5, an Alesis D4 and a generous amount of mixing and processing power. I purchased a YDD-60 for my church youth group. It is virtually identical to the DD-65 and shares the same user manual.

I agree with the previous poster. Therefore, I doubt we will be able to use its sounds. You cannot control the volume of the individual pads. There isn't individual control of pan, reverb send or pad sensitivity. That is unfortunate since the internal sounds are better than I expected.

Also if the 6 "C" batteries are too weak the configurations of the three custom user kits are lost when the unit is powered off!

I was pleasantly surprised that the kick pedal input is slightly velocity sensitive unlike most low end units. The input also works with a Roland KD-7 kick trigger but I have to be careful not to play too softly. Maybe the Yamaha triggers would work better.

The onboard speaker could not be expected to be very good but I was hoping to use it as a stage monitor for the drummer. However, when the 1/4" headphone jack is used to send the signal to the house mixer the ydd-60's speakers shut off!

I decided to abandon its internal sounds and just use it to trigger an Alesis D4. Unfortunately, I could not get an open-closed hat effect to work with the D4. The YDD60's hat pad and Pedal 2 input do provide the open-closed hat effect. Alternatively, I would have mixed the YDD-60's hat sound with the other sounds of the D4 but there was no way to turn off the sound from the other pads. It would have worked if there was an option to assign silence to all of the other pads instead of drum sounds.

This unit is almost useful to an experienced drummer as a practice setup or to lay down midi tracks. Unfortunately it is still just a toy or practice unit for a student. You'll probably be able to get one used for around $100. so it is worth checking out for a budget-minded student.

I'd be very hesitant to rely on it.

Yamaha's email support replied in 24 hrs with a confirmation that the batteries are required to maintain the user kit configuration. Thumbs up.

I am prompted to write this review because I just bought this product as an upgrade from the Yamaha dd55. As I am in Australia and Yamaha don't bring these in to the country I had to get my daughter to buy it in LA and bring it back, so I didn't get to try before buying. The dd55 has the ability to set individual pad volumes so that you can 'balance' the sounds of a kit. I found this critical to live playing. For some absolutely crazy reason they've dropped this feature from the dd65. Regarding all other features there are improvements (8 pads rather than 7, position of the hi hat pad etc.) but in my opinion none of it makes a blind bit of difference if you can't adjust individual pad volumes. I'll be selling these and going back to the dd55.