I am going to throw out right off that I am a complete newbie when it comes to MIDI, and if it means I have to listen to folks berate me for it so I can at least try to learn, so be it. I have searched the internet for hours and have come to the conclusion that you are supposed to buy this product but not actually use it as there doesn't seem to be any comprehensive set of directions for it. The directions tell you what you need to do without telling you how you go about actually doing it. I am someone that has college degree, is more than reasonably intelligent, managed a small business with gross sales in the $3m range, and is also a male and willing to turn in his man card and actually read directions IF they existed and would help. I'm not a dummy. I have both an Alesis Trigger I/O and the DDrum version, and am looking to use it to expand the number of inputs on my Strike Module and my Crimson 2 module. I have the manuals for the respective devices, but they might as well be in another language. I understand the concept of each device plugged in having a particular channel number assigned to the tip and rim, it's an elementary school version of using an ip address for networking. But what combinations of the up and down arrows on these devices gets the two different zones of say the TOM 1 input to connect back to the drum module, and from there, what combination of the up and down arrows actually allows me to assign a voice to said two zones of TOM 1? I don't see anywhere in the Strike module the capability of pulling up the midi channel of a pad plugged in and being able to assign a voice. It's so frustrating. Somehow I managed to get the rim of TOM 1 plugged in to the device to mirror the sound of the main head on TOM1 plugged in to the Strike module, but from what I was reading the channel should have been the head of the pad plugged in to the device and not the rim. If that is all i will ever accomplish, duplicating voices I already have on my kit doesn't get me anywhere. I am beginning to think it would be much easier to buy a second module, hook up additional pads and cymbals to that, run a 1/4" to 1/8" cable out from the slave module to the input line of the main module and just deal with two separate modules. As much of a pain as that would be, I am starting to think it would be many times easier than to try and use these devices that are advertised to do something that they then in turn don't actually tell you properly how to use.
So what am I missing?