::Voodoo-People::

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.

The current trend of so called Social networking at the moment is to be linked in constantly and able to provide such juicy details as (And I quote)

“going to eat a banana, read eclipse, and then go to sleep.” - http://www.twitter.com/frenchigirl

Now this may seem pointless to most people and indeed to myself but there is something incredibly addictive about spying on people’s activities and indeed allowing yourself to be spyed on.

So in order to keep up with this trend various clients have been released for the Blackberry and up until this morning I was attempting to us Twitterberry.  Now unfortuantely around about 2 weeks ago this decided that it was no longer going to download other people’s statuses leaving me tweetless for my journey home on the train.

So in response to this I removed the application and have installed Ubertwitter on my Blackberry 8820, which although is still only in Beta, seems to be a very tidy app.  This app also has support for location support, which works in the same way google maps finds your location on your mobile phone.

So now I can happily go back to watching the daily soap drama that is life from the discomfort of a First Great Western train.

And for those of you that are interested, here I am on Twitter http://twitter.com/Gary_Black

Now you may have noticed that Happiness@Gunpoint have been camping on Voodoo-People for some time, but they overstayed their welcome so I have kicked them out.

Happiness@Gunpoint

They now have their own place over at www.happinessatgunpoint.co.uk and soon their presence will be removed from our forums here and migrated to their very own space.  Be sure to update any bookmarks etc that you may have.