::Voodoo-People::

Hopefully you’ve already had a chance to read my previous article with regards to Spotify if you haven’t check out the previous post here.

As previously stated Spotify is a great tool for finding new music but it also has the benefit of helping you find music that you’ve perhaps heard somewhere else.  For instance I really wanted to find the cover of Disturbed – Down with the sickness that was played halfway through the remake of Dawn of the Dead, if you haven’t heard it its like a Jazzy Lounge version of the popular metal track.  A quick search of Spotify revealed that this was infact performed by Richard Cheese, and he does another of other great covers including Nirvana – Rape Me and Korn – Freak on a leash.

If you have spotify installed here is the playlist for Richard Cheese

Whilst on the subject of great covers and spotify I feel like I need to mention another album which is Nightmare Revisited which is the soundtrack from The Nightmare before Christmas redone by Various Artists including Korn, Marilyn Manson, and my favourite Rise Against.

Check them out and if you find any other great covers on Spotify post them in the comments section.

Ok you may have seen the blog article I wrote over on the Happiness@Gunpoint site about the service known as Gnoosic which allows you to put in a couple of band names and gives you suggestions on who else you might be interested in.

The problem is where do you go from here?  You could search youtube and see if you can find anything by the band in question but the level of success can sometimes be a little poor.

What if I told you, you could listen to pretty much any music you wanted for absolutely nothing.   No I’ve not gone completely and utterly bonkers, there is a new service called Spotify which allows you to listen to whatever you like, whenever you like for free.

www.spotify.com

Now I know what your all thinking, whats the catch?  Well the service is advertising supported so every so often you’ll get a couple of adverts streaming in between your music and there are a couple of adverts in the application itself.

Perhaps the crowning achievement of the application is to be able to create your own playlists and then share them with other people via your blog or website.  Various sources already exist online which allow people to post their playlists here I’ve listed a few:

spotifyplaylists.co.uk
spotifyfriends.com
spotifylist.com

Hopefully this is just the start of something as Spotify has once again made music enjoyable and less like a chore, and lets face it, everyone benefits as a result.

Now if you’ve been living in a box for the past couple of years you’ve probably missed the huge boom in so called music games.  The basic idea is you a scrolling bar with “notes” that you are required to hit in time to the music with your silly plastic guitar.

Things got a little more interesting with the latest series when Rock Band allowed the use of an additional drum controller so now you could play as a whole band whilst enjoying a few cold ones from the fridge.  The makers behind the Guitar Hero series quickly followed up with their own “Full Band” version and released their own drum controller.

I started drumming with an Alesis DM5 electric kit a fair few years ago and since I bought my acoustic kit it’s been sat their gathering dust, and I always wished there was a way to connect this up to my Xbox 360 so that the whole experience would be a little more true to life.

Now with the Guitar Hero World Tour drum controller this can become a reality, all that’s required is a simple MIDI cable and a little knowledge on how to set your drum brain up correctly.

The midi notes are as listed below:

Rockband / Rockband 2

• RED - MIDI Note 38 - (Snare Drum)
• YELLOW – MIDI Note 46 - (Closed Hi Hat, Hi Tom)
• BLUE – MIDI Note 48 - (Open Hi Hat, Mid Tom, Ride Cymbal)
• GREEN – MIDI Note 45 (Crash Cymbal, Low Tom)
• ORANGE – MIDI Note 36  (Kick Drum)

Guitar Hero

• RED - MIDI Note 38 (Snare Drum)
• YELLOW – MIDI Note 46 (Hi Hat, Crash 1)
• BLUE – MIDI Note 48 (Tom 1)
• GREEN – MIDI Note 45 (Tom 2)
• ORANGE – MIDI Note 49 (Ride, Crash 2)
• PURPLE – MIDI Note 36 (Kick Drum)

Now it took me a while to work out that you also need to make sure you set the MIDI channel to 10 otherwise none of this will work.  As you can most likely tell from just looking at the list above, the Rockband configuration is alot more logical for playing on a real/electric drum kit.

With more and more people developing an interest in real drumming after playing these games it can only be a good thing that such things are possible.  Whilst you still rely on the screen to provide you with what your playing and when your playing, you begin to develop muscle memory which you can take with you to the real kit.

I currently drum with Razor Pineapples (Entirely fictional Rock Band 2 band) and Happiness@Gunpoint (real life band) so if you’ve got any questions/comments leave a comment.