Tag Archives: Music

Games Music

Roland TD-9, Rock Band 3 and Pro MIDI Adapter setup

April 15, 2011 – 1:50 pm

Animaaaal!!A little while ago I blogged about setting up a MIDI interface for a Roland TD-9 (KX in my case – I love my mesh heads :) ) so it could be used to drive Rock Band. I’ve had that setup for almost 18 months now and it’s served me well, but the main problem with it is that the older Rock Bands only recognised 5 different triggers, with many doubled-up – so Yellow was both closed high-hat and high tom, green was floor tom and crash, and blue was over-used as mid tom, ride cymbal and open high-hat. I compensated for this by trying to play the songs properly anyway, by listening to the track and figuring it out for myself, or by getting sheet music for the tracks in question, which worked quite well.

In Rock Band 3 however, they introduced Pro Drums mode, which separately charts the cymbals and toms, leaving the only doubled-up trigger on blue, which still serves as open high-hat and ride cymbal. Unfortunately, my MIDI interface didn’t comply with Pro Drums mode and the new official Pro MIDI Adapter was stupidly hard to get a hold of in the UK – luckily I finally managed to get hold of one this week via Gameshark.

The good news is that the new MIDI interface almost works out of the box; they clearly decided to pre-configure it to many of the common MIDI setups of electronic drumkits, so you can actually start playing straight away (so long as you don’t use the customised setup I posted previously, in which case you’ll need to reset most of it). There are only a few small tweaks you need to make from the stock MIDI configuration on a TD-9:

  1. Dual / triple triggers don’t generally work out of the box. If your kit (like mine) has dual or triple-triggering snares, toms and cymbals, you’ll need to configure the alternate triggers to be the same MIDI note (these are listed in the manual).
    You do this on the TD-9 from the home screen by pressing FUNC (F2) > MIDI (F3), then hitting the pad / cymbal in question in the appropriate place (head, rim, bow, bell etc), then using the adjustment dial to set the MIDI note to the correct value in the table.
  2. Open / closed high-hat notes aren’t quite right. Most songs are charted so that an open high-hat is blue cymbal, but out of the box the high-hat is configured to trigger yellow cymbal in all cases, so you need to change the binding through FUNC (F2) > MIDI (F3) as above. First, hit the HH with the pedal depressed and set this to 22 (again for dual triggers, make sure you repeat this for the bow / rim), then do it again with the pedal released and set the note to 51.
  3. HH Pedal setting - you only need to mess with this if you want the HH to sound different in Freestyle mode when it’s open/closed. The blue/yellow bindings in the previous point are what you need to match the song charts, but in Freestyle mode you can set the pedal to send a MIDI control signal when it changes state so that it sounds different when you play. To do this, go into Setup > MIDI (F2) > CTRL (F2) and set Pedal CC to FOOT (4).
  4. Rock Band 3 config – to use all this you need to tell RB3 to use it, so pull up your options via Start > Options and enable all the cymbals and the secondary pedal option (as mentioned above, this only affects Freestyle, the yellow/ blue cymbal bindings control open/closed HH in songs)

That’s it! It’s a bit less complicated than my original instructions with the non-official MIDI interface, but it won’t be quite right unless you perform those steps too. I hope that saves someone a bit of time, the HH situation certainly confused me at first.

I’m pleased that I can already play Pro Drums pretty well, because I’ve been teaching myself to play the tracks correctly anyway over the last year and a bit, even though the non-Pro charting didn’t force me to. It’s really nice to have confirmation on the charting though! Lots of fun ahead. :)

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Games Music

Game reviewers are snobs

February 1, 2010 – 12:30 pm

legorockbandI’ve established a tradition on this blog of  reviewing games that came out several months ago, thus cementing the absolute irrelevance of my commentary to the majority of the intertubes for whom content goes out of date in about a day. It’s kind of the opposite of a magazine that’s delivered by ninjas every 3 hours to ensure cutting-edge coverage. Thing is, unless a game is truly awful I like to try to finish it (or at least finish with it, which is not always the same thing) before deciding my opinion of it, and these things take time.

So, I got Lego Rock Band for Christmas and we just finished the main story mode last night. This is a game that’s averaged 70 on Metacritic, and has basically been described as the lazy, ugly child of the Rock Band series. What a load of old bollocks.

I can only take from the critical reception that most reviewers are so incredibly jaded, and their hearts shrivelled to the size of a small pea, that they have no concept of pure fun any more. Either that or they have their heads wedged so firmly up their own backsides that it impaired their ability to play. Because in fact, Lego Rock Band is a really fun game. Ok, it has some limitations such as no online play (we play locally 95% of the time anyway so no biggie) , and it’s basically a carbon-copy of Rock Band with different songs,  a Lego theme, and a couple of minor additions, but so what? TT Games have perfected the art of making very amusing games with the Lego brand, and this is no different. If you find none of the cutscenes, Rock Challenges and little Lego costumes and settings amusing, then something inside you has died since childhood and you’re officially a grumpy old fart. I must admit that when LRB was announced I did a double-take and wondered WTF they were thinking, but having played it I take it all back; this game justifies its existence just by being funny, fun to play and hugely endearing.

And let’s talk about the setlist. It’s shamelessly popularist, filled with tracks that almost everyone recognises and that many music snobs will hate.  I was a little reticent about the list at first, barring a few classics like Song 2 – but when we actually played it, it turned out that a whole bunch of these tracks were outrageously fun to play. It’s not arty, it’s not revolutionary, but my goodness it’s fun. Plus, you can export all of them to your Rock Band repository, which is great and means the content is given an extended life after the game itself is finished.

beatlesrockbandSpeaking of which, I got The Beatles : Rock Band at the same time, and LRB has had about 10 times as much play time as that, simply by popular opinion. TB:RB has the authenticity, the brand power and the credibility, but when push comes to shove, it’s just not as much fun to play. It’s certainly not a bad game, and clearly features some good music (and some duds too – sorry Beatles fans), but it’s hamstringed by being entirely uncompromising, forcing you to play everything in the story ladder in a rigid tiered order with zero personal choice, and refuses to allow you to play anything other than Beatles music for the entire time you’re playing it (despite the hundreds of other tracks sitting on my hard drive). I’m sure die-hard fans love it, but for everyone else it’s a blinkered game that seems quite willing to sacrifice broader enjoyment in favour of encouraging you  to appreciate how goddamn awesome the Beatles were, to the exclusion of all others.

It certainly encourages players to buy into the myth that The Beatles single-handedly defined music in that era and everyone else was riding in their wake. For people who don’t worship them, it’s something of a straight-jacket of a game that’s enjoyable only in relatively short bursts. Personally,  a Capcom-inspired “The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones” would have made a much more interesting game (which could have been followed up with Oasis vs Blur, Michael Jackson vs Jarvis Cocker, and who knows what else) ;) And hey, just let me export the songs to my catalogue, where they would enter the normal rotation, because they’re not going to get played very much otherwise, which seems highly counter-productive. Again, I think egos are getting in the way of enjoyment here – I’m a customer, and I like The Beatles (well, some of their stuff anyway), but I like lots of other music too. I want to be able to add this content to my wider collection – why won’t you let me? No doubt because the corporate behemoth that oversees The Beatles brand doesn’t want me to, which doesn’t exactly endear me to their cause.

I buy games for entertainment, and from my perspective LRB has been short-changed in the reviews on that front. You won’t receive as much kudos for it as TB:RB from your elitist game reviewer friends, but what do they know? ;)

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Music Personal

RATM vs X Factor

December 18, 2009 – 12:17 pm

[Edit 20th Dec] We did it! Rage Against The Machine is number 1 for Christmas, proper music fans in Britain give Simon Cowell and his manufactured karaoke bullsh*t the finger. Very, very happy!! Best Christmas number 1 that I can ever remember.

I detest reality TV with a passion. I think it’s low-brow, cheap nonsense that bare-facedly celebrates the very worst elements of human nature; promoting the idea that being famous (for anything) is somehow a laudable goal in itself, and indulging the public’s cathartic desire for a feeling of superiority and power over others via venomous gossip and voting people off. It’s a corporate goldmine of course, given how they don’t have to employ writers, directors or anything – just stick a bunch of people (preferably at least 75% maladjusted) in a house/jungle, give them a set of half-assed tasks that are preferably as humiliating or conflict generating as possible, and just sit back and watch the money roll in. Repeat ad infinitum. Reprehensible drivel – and it seems to me that it taps into the same psyche as that which was seen two thousand years ago in the arenas of ancient Rome; sure, it’s illegal to watch people fight to the death or be fed to lions anymore, but it’s basically the same thing, just on a psychological level instead – right down to a modern equivalent of the chanting mob influencing which way the emperor’s thumb goes. It’s a depressing indictment of how primitive the human race really remains, for all our swanky suits and digital watches.

Compared to the likes of Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity, X Factor is almost a saint, but it’s still got plenty to answer for. Every year what is basically a glorified karaoke competition determines what will be the Christmas Number 1 single in the UK. Now, of course anyone with even a remote taste in music doesn’t pay any attention to what the charts say anyway, particularly at Christmas (oh the horror of Bob The Builder and Mr Blobby in previous years) but it is pretty depressing that every year at Christmas we get the same thing – airwaves filled with some over-produced cover version of yet another soppy ballad from someone who will most likely be mopping the floors in McD’s in 12 months time, once the corporate mangle has wrung all the commercial opportunity from them.

That’s why the Rage Against The Machine for Christmas Number 1 campaign got started, encouraging music lovers in the UK to protest and to mass-buy the anarchic single Killing In The Name in the week which will determine the Christmas #1, to send a message of disapproval. I like RATM anyway, but even if I didn’t I would have joined the campaign just for the protest vote. So far, RATM has been winning, but as of today only marginally and all the predictions are that this will be overturned on the last day of chart sampling (Saturday) as the mob descends on town centres around the country and hurry bleating to the counters with the latest production-line tat from the X Factor machine.

I hope with all my heart that somehow RATM can win – not because the charts matter, but because it would be a symbolic gesture, and an affirmation that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, there are sizeable numbers of people in the country with a decent, independent thinking head screwed onto their neck (yes, I’m aware of the irony that to prove this requires the use of crowd behaviour, that’s not the point). If you’re passionate about music, even if you don’t like RATM, I encourage you to buy the single Killing In The Name today or tomorrow, just to make a stand (iTunes, Play – or others, allegedly it’s uncertain whether Amazon counts in the charts though so avoid that one).

Here’s the video of BBC Radio 5 Live’s interview with RATM and a live rendition of the song. The band was supposed to avoid the swearing, but at the end either they got carried away or just decided to adhere to their own lyrics (“F*** you I won’t do what you tell me”) and so got frantically pulled from the airwaves at that point (this version which came from the BBC website is censored, the live version was not). Well, it was in the spirit of the thing after all, what did they expect? :)

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Games Music Personal

Complete guide to using a Roland TD9 in Rock Band

December 9, 2009 – 1:16 pm

td9_completeI’ve been branching out with my hobbies particularly in the last year or so, mostly because my back problems now prevent me from spending every waking hour hunched over a PC, coding. In a way that’s a shame – I lament the sudden drop-off in coding time and hence productivity – but it’s also good to broaden my horizons a bit. I’m 36 now after all, and spent the vast majority of my spare time in the last 8 years on Ogre, so maybe I deserve a break ;) After all, I get to work on Ogre a bit as part of my day job now anyway, if not as much as I’d like.

So, I recently bought a set of electronic drums, specifically the Roland TD-9KX. It took a while for everything to turn up, and quite a lot of time to tweak the setup until I was comfortable with it (and even now I’m still making small adjustments), but it’s been great so far. It’s amazingly expressive for an electric kit.

Now of course, I didn’t buy this kit as a Rock Band peripheral – that would be crazy, I’m learning to play drums properly in the first instance. But still, when you have this expensive kit in the room it feels silly to use the old plastic Rock Band drum kit when we play, so I sought to hook it up. I also wanted to map the inputs as realistically as possible, so for example I wanted to map the closed and open hi-hat separately (to yellow and blue respectively) so I could use the pedal for songs that had that charted (which is most of them).

The first thing I did was buy a MIDI interface – because the 360′s controller inputs are encrypted, you can’t just use a standard MIDI to USB converter so I bought a dedicated box to do it.  If you already have the GHWT drums you can just use the MIDI input on that too, but since I didn’t I decided to get this because it was compact.

The next thing was to configure the MIDI outputs on the TD-9 to properly map to the inputs in the game. Although there is information in many places on the Internet on how to do this, I didn’t find a single place that listed everything together, and I had some issues with the partial information that was out there, so I’m going to set out everything together here.

The first thing you need to know is the MIDI notes for each colour in Rock Band, and what they represent, which is available elsewhere but I’ll include for completeness:

Colour Kit Mapping MIDI Note
Red Snare* 38
Yellow Closed hi-hat*, high tom 46
Blue Open hi-hat, ride cymbal, mid tom 48
Green Crash cymbal, low tom 45
Orange Bass drum 36

*= in a small number of tracks, e.g. Everlong, the snare and closed hi-hat are reversed. You probably want to use a second kit definition to swap these over when playing these tracks

So, in one of  your kit definitions (typically you want to use kit 50, “User Kit” by default) you need to edit the MIDI out settings to reflect these settings:

  1. Press F2 (Func) then F3 (MIDI)
  2. In the ‘Pad’ tab:
    K 36 C *45
    S *38 C *45
    1 *46 R *48
    2 *48 B *48
    3 *45 A 27
    H *48

    The asterisks which appear in the display, which I’ve included, just mean the MIDI code is assigned to more than one pad, which is fine. Also important is that on dual-triggering pads there are actually 2 of these tables (see whether it says ‘HEAD’ or ‘RIM’ in the corner). To switch, just hit a pad in the appropriate place. Personally I set the rims of the main pads, and the edges of the cymbals to be the same as the main head/bow but that’s up to you. Triple-triggering ride cymbals show up as head/rim on this page, and the bell is the ‘B’ entry, of which there is only one.
    If you do set up your cymbal edges this way, be careful of dual triggering. I found the standard sensitivity settings to be fine but some people have dialed their pad sensitivity down to prevent it. Personally I didn’t want to change the feel of the kit for real playing so didn’t do this. I had originally increased my cymbal sensitivity a notch or two because I felt they weren’t loud enough, but now I’ve been using them a few days I’ve found I don’t need to do that anymore (I’m less shy about whacking them!). I was getting double-triggering when the sensitivity was up, but not now it’s back to standard.
    Some people have also adjusted their other triggering settings to avoid dual-triggering on the main pads and kick pedal for example, because the kit is so sensitive it sends a hit even if you only lightly hit it, or the kick pedal beater ‘bounces’. So far I haven’t changed this because again I want normal operation when playing for real, and I’ve adjusted my kick pedal beater angle to reduce the cases of unintentional ‘bounce’ (which is good to remove anyway) and try to be more accurate on the pads. I figure it’s better that way than to tune your kit specifically for Rock Band triggering.

  3. Press F2 to access the ‘Other’ tab:
    HH OPEN (BOW) *48
    HH CLOSED (BOW) *46
    HH OPEN (EDGE) *48
    HH CLOSED (EDGE) *46
    HH PEDAL 0
    X STICK 0

    4. That sets up the separate open/closed hi-hat settings which I wanted to use for yellow/blue respectively. Again note that the hi-hat is dual-triggering (bow and edge) but I’ve set them to the same thing.

That’s all you need to do for the kit-specific settings, now you need to alter some global MIDI settings. So exit out of the kit settings, to get back to the main screen, then:

  1. Press ‘Setup’ then F2 (MIDI)
  2. On the ‘Global’ tab you should leave everything as the default – for completeness:
    Tx/Rx CHANNEL CH10
    Tx PC ON
    Rx PC ON
    NOTE CHASE ON
    LOCAL CONTROL ON
    SOFT THRU OFF
  3. On the ‘CTRL’ tab (press F2) you should set the following:
    PEDAL CC OFF
    HH Compatibility EXTERNAL
    HH NOTE# Border 90

    These settings are very important if you want to use the hi-hat pedal properly. The “HH Compatibility” setting ensures that separate MIDI notes are sent for open and closed hi-hat, rather than just one note for the hi-hat and expecting the receiver system to remember the current state and use the ‘Pedal’ MIDI note to switch between them. The “PEDAL CC” option is also very important – I found that if I didn’t change this to ‘OFF’ then when the hi-hat pedal was depressed (to switch from blue to yellow), there was a delay in the next note which threw everything off – I presume that the HH pedal note was confusing the receiver (even though it’s set to 0 in the settings which should be an ignored note)

So there you go; a complete guide to using the TD-9 as a Rock Band controller – this took me some experimentation and collation of several very large forum posts to get completely right, so maybe someone else will find this useful.

Now I just have to train my brain to hit the note charts properly while still using the correct cymbals and hi-hat pedal as well, and not just falling back on the 4 basic pads as per the Rock Band controller. The hardest for me is the open hi-hat (learning to use my left foot too) and the ride / crash combinations since they’re backwards spatially (on a real standard kit the first crash cymbal is to the left of the ride cymbal). You really need to know the song so you know which specific part to play, but that’s the point – I’m hoping it’ll help me learn a few tracks to play stand-alone too.

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Personal Random Tech

Cheap, simple gadget satisfaction

December 2, 2009 – 11:39 am

Like most members of the male species, and particularly the geekier types, I love gadgets. Complex ones are great, but sometimes the greatest satisfaction can come from simple things that just work really well. Here’s a couple of recent buys for me that fall into this category that I thought I’d share.

Joby Gorillapod

gorillapodWhen we’re on holiday I often spend time trying to find places to put the camera so we can do a timer shot with us both in the picture, and when you’re in forests and up mountains finding a level spot is tough. I’ve gotten quite good at it, squinting at rocky outcrops and tree stumps with an almost film director level of interest, but it’s still awkward and sometimes precarious; this year in the Canadian Rockies I placed the camera on a rocky slope and only realised when I had to charge down again how many rocks were between me and the ‘mark’ I had to be at within 10 seconds, and I almost came a cropper, much to the displeasure of my wife.

I’d seen the Gorillapod before but kept forgetting to buy one before we went on holiday, so this time I bought one as soon as I thought about it, even if it’ll be sitting around unused for a while. Basically it’s just a small tripod made from a series of ball joints, each one perfectly stiff under the weight of a camera but easy enough to move, and with rubber surrounds on every joint and on the ends for grip. It’s very bendy and yet very sturdy once it’s set, so you can use it as a regular mini-tripod (but can adjust for uneven surfaces really easily), or you can suspend it from tree branches and poles, secure it up on top of fences or bollards just by bracing it, and all kinds of things. It just clips on to a small tripod mount and folds up really small.

It’s just an incredibly useful little gadget that I wish I’d had for holidays ages ago, and I imagine regular photographers would find it invaluable too.

Bicycle iPod Mounts (for drum kits)

ipod_mountI don’t ride a bike anymore, but after setting up my drum kit I realised I needed somewhere to mount my iPod if I was going to hook it up for practice, rather than having it on the floor or using gaffer tape or something. Surprisingly there didn’t appear to be any standard accessories to do this (a bit of an oversight on Roland’s part I think since this must be a common requirement), so I was nosing around in the VDrums forum and discovered that most people were just using regular old bicycle mountings, and attaching them to one of the cymbal riser arms (since they’re about the same diameter as bicycle handlebars, compared to the main drum frame which is much thicker).

They were cheap so I gave it a try, and sure enough it works beautifully – you wouldn’t know that the mounting wasn’t made entirely for this specific purpose in fact. Score one for the community :)

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Games Internet Music

1000 song Rock Band marathon for Childs Play

November 29, 2009 – 12:43 pm

I have to hand it to the guys at the Clan of the Gray Wolf, who are doing a 1,000 song Rock Band marathon for the charity Childs Play, all streamed live on the Internet. Presumably this is linked with the fact that Rock Band itself recently crested the 2009 target of having 1000 in-game tracks – and a month earlier than their deadline.

clanofgraywolf_rbmarathon.

At the time of writing they’re 46 hours in which given that they’ve tackled 615 songs so far, represents not quite two thirds of the way. Even though there’s 6 of them taking shifts (3 playing, one commenting), this is still an ambitious thing to be trying – we haven’t even tackled the 80-odd song Endless Setlist 2 in Rock Band 2 yet, and probably never will! I can’t imagine how bad their blisters are going to be after this, not to mention their vision – my guess is that the whole world is going to look like it’s scrolling upwards for them in the next week.

Anyway, much respect – I encourage you to donate if like me you respect this kind of crazy endeavour which is nevertheless brimming with geek cool.

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Music Personal

The evil of couriers

November 26, 2009 – 1:33 pm

I never seem to have very much luck with couriers. I remember the very first time I ever had to have something delivered by courier, it was in fact my very first PC from a company called Multiplex (long since deceased), in 1991 – the days when you really had no choice but to mail-order to get a PC. It was a searingly sexy 386 33Mhz with 14″ CRT VGA monitor (take that EGA / CGA losers!), 1MB video card (oooh), a massive 100MB hard drive, and dual Soundblaster (the original!) and Roland (for MIDI) sound cards. It cost me something like 2-3 months salary and clearly I was keen to see it arrive in one piece, having paid through the nose for shipping too. It took 2 weeks to arrive, and some of that was it sitting behind a door in a barely watertight hut at a local freight depo because they weren’t sure how to classify it for customs and decided they’d figure it out after a few more (days) cups of tea – without telling me of course. This was before internet tracking of parcels so they could get away with it – I was livid.

Since then I’ve had couriers who have just knocked off early and pretended that they called at the house and ‘carded it’ because no-one was home, despite the fact that I was at home all day and there was no card in the door anyway. I’ve had couriers that delayed a couple of days because they “couldn’t figure out where the house was”, because their clipboard was missing a couple of lines of address – this is despite a) the box itself having the full address perfectly clearly on it, and b) even their badly transcribed clipboard had a postcode and a house name, which even a trained monkey should be able to resolve to a location. Basically, all kinds of silly excuses. I’ve often wondered how couriers can get away with charging the fees they do when they often seem so much more incompetent than regular postal services. The only couriers I’ve found that are actually 100% reliable are FedEx, who are locally served by the post office – whenever I need to send something important for my business, I only ever use them.

It should therefore perhaps have been no surprise that my recent order of musical instruments went somewhat awry because of couriers – there were 5 packages in all, originating in Newcastle, 4 of which arrived on my doorstep on Tuesday, after a 4 working day transit (about average when crossing the Channel is involved). But, just for variety, the courier company decided to route the final package to Birmingham, Huddersfield, and then back to Newcastle over the course of the last week. Thankfully (?!) we do have internet tracking now so I can watch it doing its merry dance while I fume. Apparently there are some ‘paperwork issues’, but quite why it took a week-long circular journey around the country before they figured that out, and why the other 4 packages in the same consignment didn’t have this problem,  is anyone’s guess.

So, I have most of my drums, but I don’t have a kick pedal or stool so I can’t really use them properly yet, and probably won’t be able to until next week sometime. Sigh. At least they work, it’s just annoying not to be able to configure the setup properly yet and just play. The best thing is that my wife has her piano set up now, which was in 2 of the 4 boxes that made it through the transit minefield; it’s really good and she seems most pleased.

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Music Personal

Filling the house with instruments

November 10, 2009 – 7:15 pm

roland_td-9kxI took up playing the guitar a couple of years ago, after almost 2 decades of not touching any musical instruments and forgetting just about all the musical theory that I’d learned. I’ve enjoyed it; despite not being that good yet, it’s nice to pick up a new skill and I discovered I still like music despite abandoning the study of it years ago. So I have 2 guitars in the house now, one accoustic and one electric. But it appears this was just the start.

People warned me I would succumb to GAS (“Gear Acquisition Syndrome”) – I don’t actually have any plans to buy more guitars just yet, but I’m planning on taking up playing drums, having enjoyed the simulated experience enormously on Rock Band. That might sound rather silly, since it’s just a game – but when playing on Expert (which I do quite a lot now) the rhythm patterns are usually the same as the real drum chart, you’re just missing a hi-hat pedal and some pads are doubled up – so it’s a pretty good approximation. I’ve found drumming hugely satisfying; there’s something about nailing a complex rhythm that feels visceral and the more vigorous tracks are also a great workout – all in all a very nice buzz. So now my back is much stronger, I want to see if I can legitimately add “Drummer (amateur)” to my CV :) I’ve discovered there’s a DrumTech affiliated drum teacher locally too so I’ll probably grab a few lessons and see how that goes.

yamaha_dgx-630An accoustic kit is likely to be a bit cumbersome and loud in our wood-floored house, so I’m planning on getting a Roland TD-9KX which should give me a good practice set-up without the noise.  They’re expensive, but everyone I talk to about this says you only regret going cheap and just end up spending more on upgrades, so it’s better to get the best you can. The TD-9 is a great module and all-mesh heads are a much better sim of an accoustic kit, and importantly they’re kinder to your hands than rubber, which is key when you’re approaching middle age and already have RSI ;)

My wife is getting in on the act too. She’s wanted to learn piano properly for a while, so we’re going to get her a Yamaha DGX-630 so she can do that. I used to play a little when I was younger so I might steal a few goes on it too ;)

So, that’s our Christmas treats for this year sorted out :) It’s a fair amount of cash to splash since we’re going for quality kit, but I figure we’re more likely to enjoy playing if the kit we buy is decent, and besides these are better investments than most other things we could buy, seeing as they let us develop a fun skill. And what the hell, it’s only money -  you can’t take it with you ;) Looking forward to it!

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Games Music

My Foo Fighters wish list is fulfilled

November 4, 2009 – 1:09 pm

foofightersAs I’ve said before Harmonix really like Foo Fighters, and/or the Foos really like Rock Band, because this week we had more tracks from the band (plus some from Nirvana, where of course Grohl cut his teeth as a drummer before emerging from the shadows as a bloody good all-rounder) which is great in my book. Despite this year’s album being a little too easy-listening for my tastes, Foo Fighters remain one of my favourite bands of the last decade or so.

My last ‘must have’ track was The Pretender, and that got delivered this week, along with Best of You (also a great track) and a couple from the new album, Wheels and Word Forward, which are ok but I can take or leave (in this case, leave). I actually think my list is all Foo-ed out now. Not that I’d resist if they added more to choose from of course ;)

The Nirvana tracks I’m sure are welcome for their dedicated fans, but once again they deftly manage to avoid the tracks I’d pay money for – Smells Like Teen Spirit, Lithium and Come As You Are. I’m not a huge Nirvana fan, clearly they were ground-breaking for their time, but too many of their tracks sound too much alike for my post teen angst tastes. Only those 3 really stand out for me as worth a purchase; the rest feel a bit like rearrangements of the same songs.

And the Joan Jett track? Hmm. Great video for laughing at crap video effects though. :)

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Games Music

Woo, we’ve passed 300 tracks

October 20, 2009 – 1:52 pm

I could hug Harmonix. They have lived up to their original promise to providing a large, ever-expanding and varied collection of tracks on Rock Band with the kind of fervour that I think even fans have been surprised by. Apart from a couple of odd cases (Lego Rock Band and Beatles: Rock Band – the former puzzling, the latter due to brand management insistence that The Beatles should be revered as gods and can’t be seen mixing with peasants) Harmonix have avoided fragmenting the content available as much as possible and the result is a lot of people who have no reason to buy another music game; in fact there’s a positive incentive not to. It makes games that don’t try to integrate their content look a bit backward – it’s like being forced to use a portable CD player when you’ve been used to having everything immediately available on your iPod – inconvenient and horribly outdated.

So with the release of the Queen Pack today we passed the 300 track mark on Rock Band (307 in fact), which is both awesome and a little scary. That’s not even a third of the current content available, and it’s likely to go up once the Rock Band Network comes online. Will we ever stop? Well, we never stop stuffing new tracks in our iPods, so I don’t see why we would stop buying Rock Band tracks for the forseeable future either.

In related news, corporalgregg, the best source for full-band HD previews of tracks got his account suspended again (he thinks by Activision because he posted a GH video with Kurt Cobain in it) so has opened another one. Still the best place to go to review new RB tracks you’re thinking of buying IMO, but it’s a shame all that history has been lost. Thanks, big corporate bully.

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