Although Yamaha have seriously upped their game with the Revo drum kits, they have one weakness compared to Korg’s kits...

Korg’s kits have been good for a long time, and do it with basically a fairly standard drum sound layout. But Yamaha’s Revo kits rely on a lot of new sounds on new note#’s for things like more hi hat and snare articulations etc., and the weakness of this is, if you substitute the new Revo kits on older styles, you lose all those extra sounds unless you go in and seriously edit the style.

But replace an old legacy kit from an old style with a Korg PA4X new kit, it’s going to sound better out of the box. I think Yamaha could do themselves a solid by creating new kits based around the Revo sounds, but with the new articulations mapped more to velocity switches on the legacy note#’s, so plug them into an old style, it uses the sounds more without editing...

Unfortunately, across the board, manufacturers are abandoning the old GS note number layouts and everybody has sort of shotgunned the new articulations to non-standard notes, rather than getting together and deciding where these new sounds need to go to continue the cross-platform compatibility that GS helped bring about.

Sadly, it seems that Roland are out of the standardization game now, and no longer have the market clout to essentially dictate to everyone else where drum sounds should go. Somebody needs to step up to the plate, or Korg and Yamaha need to get their heads together and work out a new ‘SuperGS’ standard so we can go back to the ease we used to have...

It’s got to be a PITA for anyone making styles these days to have to seriously remap the drums when making styles for more than one manufacturer!