When the rest of the guys are still tooling around in the dressing room or checking their email, what’s the acoustic drummer (or his tech) doing? Yup, setting up. When the bass player’s gone “thunk” a couple of times, the guitarist’s crashed a couple of power chords, and the keyboard player’s ripped a few licks on his piano, what are YOU doing? Yup, that’s right. Crack, crack, crack, crack, crack…

Let’s not even get into the possibility of questionable house sound engineers in smaller clubs who might not even know how to kill that ring on the snare! The DTXTREME IIS is going to make everyone’s life on the road a lot easier.

Even if you’re not an experienced sound engineer, you’ll quickly figure out that too much sound coming off stage renders you and your little mixing board completely useless. And who generally gets the blame for rising sound levels? Yes, you. And they’re probably right. It goes with the territory.

But with the DTXTREME IIS under your sticks, they’re going to have to look elsewhere. Sure you may play harder as the entire room becomes one giant mosh pit, but you ain’t actually getting any louder.

If your music is fairly structured, you may need to do two things that are always guaranteed to raise the on-stage anxiety level: play to a click or play with loops.

“Sorry I turned the beat around.” “Sorry I missed that last chorus.” You can fill in plenty of other mishaps we’re sure. With the DTXTREME IIS, your click track can set directly on the brain, plus you can send it out on one pre-determined output. Ditto loops. Safety in numbers to be sure.

And the other numbers to think about are size and weight. The DTXTREME IIS weighs but a fraction of an acoustic kit. The individual TP100 tom pads measure a reasonable 10” in diameter, while the TP120S snare is a very generous 12".