::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.