MIDI Drums For Guitar Hero And Rock Band

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a497Hom8Gg&fmt=18]

Embedded above is [egyokeo]’s solution for using MIDI drums with Guitar Hero. He’s playing a DrumKAT MIDI kit. It connects to a PC running his MIDI Hero software, which handles timing and multinote combinations. The PC uses a USB ToolStick microcontroller to send commands to the console using an FPS adapter or soldered into the instrument. It’s a fairly good solution if you’re building a generic controller and need to modify the signaling.

When Rock Band was first released, modders sought to adapt their MIDI drum kits for use with the game. The easiest solution they found was Highly Liquid’s MSA-P. It’s a photorelay based MIDI decoder. You need to solder directly to the brain in the Rock Band drums. If you’re planning on modding any instrument, check the compatibility matrix first. Hopefully you’ll end up with something that can be used across multiple games.

[via Gizmodo]

18 thoughts on “MIDI Drums For Guitar Hero And Rock Band

  1. I remember seeing egyokeo’s work before, coulda sworn it was here. Nice update on the work, anyways. :P

    Just a note — it’s my understanding that the drum kit for Guitar Hero WT’s midi port on the back *can* accept an input (I saw it in an interview), as well as be used for an output. I don’t have the hardware to confirm this, but this could be used as a bridge for the drum aspect of the project (the kit works in RB as well, I believe), though it wouldn’t allow drums to play as guitars (as the featured project shows). Just throwing it out there, I haven’t honestly seen much experimentation in the area.

    –matt

  2. you could argue he was using a preprogramed midi sequence and miming the hits but that was a almost flawless performance and he made some mistakes so hey i doubt it was fak good to him

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