Yamaha DD50AD Touch-Sensitive Digital Drums with AC Adapter

The Yamaha DD50AD touch-sensitive digital drums enable you to practice or play anywhere with the full set of drummer's tools at your fingertips. Features like 4 large and 3 small touch-sensitive drum pads, 75 assignable PCM voices, 100 PCM rhythm styles, and 20 pre-programmed and 1 programmable percussion sets ensure you will be driving beats that fully express your creativity.

The Yamaha DD50AD helps you master any percussion style at the tempo you choose. The two foot switches for high hat and bass make it a true drumming experience. An easy-to-read LED display and enhanced buttons and dials make for a very user-friendly interface. General MIDI compatibility and MIDI in/out ports mean you can hook the drums up to your PC for some serious music producing. A set of drumsticks and headphone jacks are included. The machine can be powered by the Yamaha AC adapter, which is also included. This unit comes with a one-year manufacturer's warranty.
Customer Review: Brought me back to drums
I had played drums all my life and had been on the road as a pro when I was younger. I hadnt played for a long time as it was too much hassle and took up too much room to set up real drums. I saw a set of these at Sam's and bought them. I set it up on an old snare stand in the corner of the bedroom and started playing them regularly. Soon I got better pedals and an Alesis D4 and MIDI connected these to it and before long I got an entire set up of electronic drums and now I am back playing and recording and loving it. All thanks to a little old Yamaha DD50!
Customer Review: I can make it better!
I recently purchased a DD50 from ebay - and it was about what I expected. Yamaha make generally good trusty products - but this kit has the same basic flaw as all electronic druma I have tried - that is - the pads do not pick up light strokes - and also don't respond to heavy hits. In other words they don't react anything like real drums. Ok this is a very cheap unit so you get what you pay for right? - well actually - I did design and market electronic drums (analogue type) back in the eighties - and I spent a long time working on this "response" thing - eventually getting very impressive results. So when I got the DD50 recently I immediately set about improving things - and I have devised a fairly simple way of improving the response drastically with a bit of add-on circuitry. If you are interested please email me. mickwest1@hotmail.com

Perfect Pitch - You Can Learn it Too

Absolute pitch or perfect pitch is the ability for a person to distinguish or recreate a musical note without a known reference. What this means is that if play a random note on a instrument a person with perfect pitch can immediately identify it. other abilities persons with perfect pitch may exhibit are:

Identify and name individual pitches (e.g. A, B, C#) played on various instruments
Name the key of a given piece of tonal music
Identify and name all the tones of a given chord or other tonal mass
Sing a given pitch without an external reference
Name the pitches of common everyday noises such as car horns

It will allow you to play harder pieces of music because the perfect allows you to focus attention on the exact notes presented in a musical score rather than the structure.

Perfect pitch was once thought to be a inborn skill but recently it has been discovered that it can be learned. There are many advantages to learning perfect pitch, one such advantage would be the ability to transpose music while sight reading.

Perfect pitch will also allow you to easily replay a song you have just heard.

I've recently learned how to use this amazing ability and i can't begin to tell how much it has improved my guitar playing ability. I can recreate any sound i hear through my guitar and every song i hear just flows out.

Spender, N. (1980). "Absolute Pitch", in Sadie, S. (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: Macmillan, 27-29. ISBN 0-333-23111-2.

Musical Stuff