Wow. all that effort just to pretend to play music. I’d be more impressed if they used it as a midi controller for REAL musical performance.

Posted at 1:35 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by joe57005

I’d be more impressed if he used it to end world hunger.

Posted at 1:58 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by Chris

Nice. I might do something like that myself (I’ver already had to repair my pedal once and I’ve only had it a week :s).

@joe57005 Thats already been done, and is relativelly easy, especially with the PS3 version. The PS3/PS2 version shows up in windows (and presumably in other OSes, I havn’t tried) as a standard game controller (openness for the win!). The 360 version is a little more difficult, as it requires the Microsoft wireless reciever thingy, and a short hack. I don’t know about the Wii version (that’s shown) but I would guess it’s just like other wiimote add-ons, which require a bluetooth dongle and a program called glovepie (under windows anyway). Once you have it working like that it’s really not that hard to make a program which interprets the hits and plays either a sampled drum sound or the correct midi note (By midi I meen the “music” format not the instrument connection standard).

Posted at 2:00 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by Alphathon

i’d be more impressed if he used it to hack the pentagon! fyi, the drumkit on these games is like playing a real instrument… take it from a real life drummer!

Posted at 2:01 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by jimi

yeah, except I’m not impressed until he ends world hunger by playing real music.

Posted at 2:02 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by dave

Technically, you can, the drum set for World Tour has a Midi interface, though I don’t have a control unit to test it. Though this mod is nothing new really, people had this type of mod and mods for a double bass pedal for the original Rock Band ^_^ Though, I do have to say good job ^_^

Posted at 2:03 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by Ryan

hmm one of my friends has a broken rock band kick pedal… I might try building one of these, it sounds like it would work much better than the standard pedal…

The title is misleading though, because it says “rock band” and this was built for guitar hero world tour. As the article states they use different methods to detect a bass drum hit and the author believes that this method wont work on Rock Band, though I think it might.

I’m also not so sure that you’d even need to use, the practice pad. You could have the pedal hit against a small block of wood with the sensor and it would probably work just as well.

And joe57005, your comment is about as creative as pretending to play music… seriously the whole “learn to play a real instrument” insult is played out. There’s a lot of people out there who would rather drop a small amount of money on a game like this and have a few hours of fun with their friends who aren’t at all interested in spending a large amount of money and several years learning to play a real instrument.

Posted at 2:04 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by twistedsymphony

@ryan the midi interface is in only and cannot be used to make the controller into a midi drumkit as-is. You might be able hack the hardware to so, but TBH it would be easier to it in software.

Posted at 2:05 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by Alphathon

@ryan: it does have a midi interface, but it is only a midi in port so you can only receive midi events from the kit via bluetooth/usb/etc.

Posted at 2:08 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by quique

ah, that’s right, I got mixed up with something else I’m working on >.< Oh, and the bass pedal for Rock Band is a simple ON/OFF operation, so if you want to use a piezoelectric sensor you have to convert it to that. Since all the base pedal does is connect a pin on the micro controller to ground.

Posted at 2:11 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by Ryan

Can’t wait for chef hero to come out – then you can pretend that you know how to cook too.

//don’t get your barbie doll panties in a knot – your mom wouldn’t like it.

Posted at 3:16 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by VonSkippy

joe57005 – I wrote a max/msp patch called miditar hero to do exactly that. It works with any rock band or guitar hero guitar or drum set that can be connected via USB. it’s extremely easy to use, and only requires the max/msp runtime, the necessary controller drivers, and the miditar hero software.

http://miditarhero.wordpress.com

Posted at 5:41 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by bwestplaysdrums

I was converting drum practice pads into piezo trigger pads for my Alesis D4 15 years ago…nice to see the technique still lives.

Posted at 6:02 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by Happosai

this is actually pretty funny- scorehero.com has been churning out mods like this for months. this one is pretty well made though.

Posted at 6:16 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by Slagr

… This is confusing the hell out of me. Title says Rock Band, but that image is definitely Guitar Hero: World Tour.

Posted at 9:36 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by Harrison

@twistedsymphony: Article writer here. I actually did exactly what you’re describing for my neighbor’s Rock Band 1 pedal, and I’m going to put up a tutorial shortly with full details.

Basically, it’s a cheap magnetic switch like what you’d find in an alarm circuit. Bob (my partner-in-crime) and I simply took a piece of wood, strapped it to the front of the pedal, attached the wired portion of the sensor, and covered it in carpeting to dampen the sound. I turned the beater around to thump against the sensor, and embedded a magnet into the beater itself. Very easy and portable (but only compatible with Rock Band).

The practice pad simply gives you a nice muffled surface to attach a sensor to. It does a great job, but it’s not technically required.

To those of you who want me to end world hunger or hack the pentagon, who do you think I am? Bob Geldof? Kevin Mitnick?

Oh, and I never claimed I came up with this stuff; people have been making this stuff for GH:WT and Rock Band for awhile, and real musicians have been using stuff like this for years. The reason I put this up is that fixing up broken GH / RB controllers is much easier than most people think!

Posted at 10:15 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by Rschmidt

@alphathon: Nobody seems to have made a driver for the GH:WT drums on the Wii. I don’t know what’s keeping things from moving forward, but GlovePIE doesn’t see any input coming from the drums, only from the Wiimote itself. If you or anybody else comes up with a working solution, I’d love to hear about it.

Posted at 10:21 pm on Feb 3rd, 2009 by Rschmidt

Well I’m sure it’ll come along eventually. It took rather a long time for support for the GH3 guitar to come out, and that is essentially a classic controller as far as glovepie is concerned (if told to use a classic controller buttons and a guitar controller is there, it’ll still work). I would imagine it would take a while longer for the drum kit, but it should come along eventually. Of cource it wouldn’t be impossible to do it from scratch, but that would require writing software to interface with the wii remote, which would probably take longer than setting the drums up in glovepie. Its a shame its not open source.

Posted at 2:10 am on Feb 4th, 2009 by Alphathon

@alphathon: That’s what I’m hoping too, but GlovePIE seems to be out of development. I did try a few times to get things working with various libraries, but apparently there’s some sort of addressing issue preventing people from getting it working. The drums don’t seem to register as a controller extension like the nunchuk or other extensions. I did get Glovepie working with Frets on Fire and a GH3 guitar, and it’s great for ‘map x to y’ stuff… but I’d really need to find a working interface of some sort for the drums, whether it’s an entire app or a library.

Posted at 5:31 am on Feb 4th, 2009 by Rschmidt

Not really innovative or a serious mod. Not hatin’, just relatin’.

Practice pads w/ piezo has been done for quite a while (years).

Posted at 8:07 am on Feb 4th, 2009 by T

@rschmidt: Really? I do hope not, it’s a great piece of software, and it would be really sad if it wasn’t in development anymore. Hope it’s not for the same reason as PPJoy (nobody emailed him saying “this software is great” so he gave up). What do you meen by it doesn’t register as one? Surely it must or it wouldn’t work (or am I missing something, like it being specifically programmed into GH:WT how to handle it rather than using the standards set by nintendo. I just hate it when developers do that.) I suppose the guitar would have to work like that as the GH3 one did and it would need to be the same for backward compatability (of both the game with the GH3 one and GH3 with the new guitar) but is usppose drums wouldn’t have the same restrictions (Harmonix didn’t even use wiimote add-ons for their periferals, so i suppose it could be worse)

Posted at 1:34 pm on Feb 4th, 2009 by Alphathon

@alphathon: Yeah, Carl Kenner hasn’t updated anything on his site in a long time, but he never specifically said he was stopping development. The post on the latest update of Glovepie, 0.3.0, says it’s got some wiimote calibration / IR bugs but that a patch should be out ’shortly’. It never actually came out, at least to my knowledge.

However… as far as the ‘not registering’ stuff goes, what I meant to say was that GlovePIE doesn’t see it as a connected extension, and can’t initialize the device because it doesn’t know what it is or whether it’s plugged in properly. Using the ‘detect input’ tool in GlovePIE doesn’t do anything because the drum kit is still waiting for something. However… good news, you can always count on the Frets On Fire community to hack the everliving crap out of something.

Check this thread out: http://www.fretsonfire.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=29037&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Apparently, it works, but I haven’t had the chance to try it yet. I’ll blog it up if I do, of course.

I don’t think this is exactly a case of the developers specifically making it hard for us; it’s just that without a little bit of knowledge about how it works (where it writes in the Wiimote memory, for example) it’s a question of dumping all the bluetooth traffic and figuring things out by hand.

The Wii itself makes things a bit harder than the other platforms, I think. As far as standards go, I just bought RB2, and the GH:WT drums work flawlessly, so there’s definitely no secret magic going on.

Anyway, if you try this and it works, let me know!

Posted at 2:03 pm on Feb 4th, 2009 by Rschmidt

@alphathon: Oh, and Carl Kenner is in that thread, talking about writing a new version of GlovePIE that integrates this stuff, so it looks like I was wrong about it being out of development!

Posted at 2:12 pm on Feb 4th, 2009 by Rschmidt

@Rschmidt: Thats good news! anyway, I can’t try it myself as I have the PS3 version so mine just works as-is (minus velocity sensitivity, which makes it just a little unresponsive)

Posted at 2:24 pm on Feb 4th, 2009 by Alphathon

hey you know what you should do?
you should use a double kick with that.

Posted at 2:02 pm on Jun 4th, 2009 by DoYouLikeFishDicks?