Yamaha DD-55 Electronic Drum Pad with Dimension and JV1010

I wanted to pass on some lessons learned:
I spent the evening getting Yamaha DD-55 to Sonar 6
I chose Sonar 6 over P5 because you have alot more control of the ports there. I was able to get my Yamaha DD-55 Electronic drum set to communicate with Dimension, using the drum sets banks in Dimension. I was surprised that also my JV-1010 also works quite well with it. What seemed to have some problems was the new Drum vsti that is in Sonar 6: Session Drummer 2. I was getting echo back problems in it and it seems to have big time latency issues. So I think Dimension is the better of the two paths. Use the drum machine to control Dimension.
I have not used this drum set in a while but I can tell you its markedly easier in Sonar 6 then it was using it in Sonar 4. The new midi interface in Sonar 6 has improved alot!
Since the drum set is on the other side if the room I used the demo song drums to establish a connection. This offers a continuous play of the drum signal. Otherwise you have to have someone over there pounding on the drums till you get the right connectons.
As usual the broadcast channel was 10 for drums. You set the input port to chanel 10 and wherever your midi in is coming from. Then out goes to Dimension.
I think it was accepting velocity commands to from the drum pads.
You can go into Sonar and remap the drum patterns as desired. This enables you to customize Dimensions on board drum sounds with each pad. There is also a way to do the custom settings on the DD-55. Incidentally i have seen this machine for as low as $40 pm black Friday sells. That for a midi controller is phenominal.

I have the dd-55 too. I also bought a kp65 kickpad for it, and a regular kick pedal. I run an expression controller from a keyboard that is merged with dd-55 events, to change openness of hihats.

The feel of this setup is quite real to play a full kit. All I have to do is practice to play better though

Usually I use kit 5 in dd-55 and all I have to remap is the kick(on the dd-55 itself) to make it GM standard.

I use DFH 1, loaded into Vsampler, and have remapped this to a library for GM standard. And also made an external midi controller set the amount of room miking(one for kick, snare, toms, cymblas and hihats separately) for the sound to fit the mix, to select which of 9 snares, and which of 5 kicks to use. I use Evolution UC33e as controller.

Now all I have left is to make music

The recorded midi from dd-55 will incorporate quite a few zero duration notes, which will cause some trouble as with the scrub tool i piano roll. Events are shown, but not played when dragging mouse.

So a CAL program was made to make all durations at least 40 ticks and a simple operation. Then all is fine.

I run S4. Maybe this is fixed in S6.

Wow your setup sounds great!
There is a way I read in the manual where you can have a separate midi channel out for each pad. For the money its a nice drum set. I am with you I need to practice with it. The demo songs it has are a good way to start.

This is close to a copy of the DD55 but half price:
http://www.thomann.de/de/millenium_md70_digital_drumset.htm

I have not tested though if the same features are there as in DD55.