SteveStreeting.com

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.

I’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:

*= 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

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.

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.

.

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.

As 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.

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.

Oh hell yes.

Finally, one of the best British classic rock bands that was sorely missing from Rock Band makes an appearance on 20th October, and how:

• Another One Bites The Dust
• Crazy Little Thing Called Love
• One Vision
• Fat Bottomed Girls
• I Want It All
• I Want To Break Free
• Killer Queen
• Somebody To Love
• Tie Your Mother Down
• Under Pressure

Now, I could lament the absence of Don’t Stop Me Now, and Princes of the Universe which I would have loved, but really that would be being petulant because this list is pure class. Anyone with any sense has been crying out for Queen in Rock Band for ages, and now we have a duty to shut up and save our voices for some serious (or rather seriously bad) Freddy Mercury impressions. Now, where did I put my sparkly low-cut one-piece?

[Edit]Oh, and huge kudos to Harmonix for bringing us some Kula Shaker this week. Feel free to follow in that vein with some Ocean Colour Scene, Happy Mondays, Seahorses and Shed Seven guys

RockBandContent.com is being shut down because the maintainer hasn’t got time to do it anymore, which is a shame because it’s a really nice site for browsing the increasingly crushing number of Rock Band tracks available and finding videos of people playing the charts before you buy.

However, I found over time that the best videos came from corporalgregg2, who always posts full-band videos which saves a lot of time over the individual instrument videos, as well as being very good so you can actually hear the song with everyone playing on Expert So I’m just subscribed to him from now on for reviewing the new songs as they come out. This week is really good again – you can’t complain when you get Blur, Kaiser Chiefs and Foo Fighters in one week.

One thing that’s always irked me about Rock Band 2 is that despite the song database being really good, with album groupings, filtering by artist / genre etc, album art, individual instrument difficulties and all that, it’s missing one vital feature: a ‘Recently Added’ playlist, or at least a sort by release date. When you get quite a big song list, and your friends ask ‘So what’s new recently?’, you’re forced to either remember (never a sound strategy for me), or page through all the songs looking for things that are new. It’s such an obvious feature that I wonder whether they just don’t have access to that information on the DLC files which is why it’s not there – I can’t imagine no-one’s asked for it; our list is ‘only’ 270-odd songs deep and it’s an issue, I can’t imagine what it’s like if you own all 800+ songs.

However, I found a website which helps with that in the comments of the RockBandContent.com shutdown post – MyRockBandSongs.com. It lets you add all the songs you’ve purchased and then sort them by date added. And when you add in bulk, that still sub-sorts by release date, which is perfect. At least I can whip out my mobile and look it up when someone asks, or link friends to it! Here’s my personal hastily constructed page – it may not be 100% complete, I added things in a rush.

When Harmonix responded to GHWT’s user-created content feature by saying they wanted to hold off until they could do it properly, they definitely weren’t kidding. Today they announced the Rock Band Network, which will be online later this year (on 360 only for the moment, because it seems they’re piggy-backing on the XNA Creator’s Club to handle the submission and billing).

Rather than provide an in-game sequencer using samples like GHWT does, with RBN bands use their original master tracks, recorded using their usual software but presumably still split into the appropriate tracks, and gives them a set of tools (for PC I assume) to add the MIDI notes which will be translated into the instrument charts. They can also control animation and stage events to sync with their track. All instruments are supported including the vocal track (GHWT didn’t allow custom vocals); there’s no limits because the master track is always used. Once packaged up & ready, artists can then upload their music directly, set a price for it, and have it show up for purchase on the Marketplace where anyone can buy it, and the artist gets a cut of the revenue.

This is a superb idea. Not only do you get ‘proper’ music rather than just sequenced sample notes with no vocals (because the tools every band gets to use are the same as the ones Harmonix use to create their tracks), but there’s also a direct incentive for good independent bands to get their music on there, since it can earn them some money as well as get them publicity. I shudder to think how many tracks might end up on there – we’ll definitely need some reviews pronto to help point us to the best ones; it looks like the RBN website has that functionality built-in as a pre-release step using community reviewers (presumably this is also to filter out IP-violating music and dodgy content before it hits the masses too), but I’m sure the community will run with this as RockBandContent.com did once the tracks are public.

The great thing is that it probably won’t even be just ‘unknown’ bands that use this. Harmonix obviously have to prioritise their DLC pipeline, so they can’t cover everything (even though they seem to try). I can imagine there will be loads of signed bands who are just lower down the priority list who could take the matter into their own hands now, and get their music on there as a promotional thing. For non-US bands in particular (who, let’s face it, tend to end up under-prioritised compared to US bands), I think this could be very, very big.

I think this could be huge for both players and bands. The current 700 track selection could be paltry in comparison once this has been running for a while. Once again, Harmonix leads the way when it comes to tapping into the spirit of this genre!

Guitar Hero and Rock Band have been derided by some, with extensive cries of ‘learn a real instrument!’; however it’s my experience that by making simulated instrument playing more accessible to the masses, these games are responsible for many taking up an instrument for the first time, or reconnecting with a previously abandoned musical hobby.

It’s the latter for me – I was heavily involved in music throughout my school days, until an overly pushy music teacher sucked all the joy out of it (what, you have a free evening / weekend that you’re not playing music in? Heresy!), to the extent that I did the typical ‘teenage overreaction’ and quit every school orchestra, band, choir (yeah, I know, deeply uncool), music exam (I quit part way through grade 7), and extra-curricular musical activity (and there were many) all at once. It drove her nuts, which was highly satisfying, and was a wonderful release for me to go do other things, like learning how to code. For years I didn’t look back.

Rhythm-action games re-awakened something in me that I’d forgotten was there – a love of participation in music. I think I had a long-established psychological block that associated playing music with something that was all hard work and no fun, because that’s what my experience had turned into. Sure, the games highly simplify the process, but that’s the point; by hiding the ‘work’ part away for a while, for me they reconnected a mental circuit between ‘playing music’ and ‘fun’ again which had long been broken. It’s been highly theraupeutic, and considerably cheaper than a shrink

So, I’ve picked up playing the guitar, and I’m getting along fairly well I think, but most importantly I’m enjoying it. I’ve also discovered via Rock Band that I find drums very satisfying, and I seem to have a fair amount of natural ability there – maybe not compared to some people online, but I’m competent enough to enjoy playing some of the moderately complex tracks the most (Keith Moon, you really were unique).

So, I’ve decided to buy a real drum-kit later in the year and see if I can learn to play for real. I’m going to wait a few more months, because I still have some problems with my back which disrupted my ability to play even simulated drums for a while, but as I’ve recovered I’ve been able to play more and more comfortably again. I’m not going to risk practice-related injuries before we go on holiday in August/September, so I’ll probably look to start in the autumn. I’ve pretty much decided what practice kit to get: the Roland TD-4k, which seems like a good starting point. I don’t really have room for a full acoustic kit, and an electronic one will be a little easier on everyone else Plus, the Roland’s sound really good these days, and I’ll be able to plug it into Rock Band if I want as an added bonus via a converter. Edit: slight issue with the TD4 though, you can’t individually map the MIDI codes for the open and closed hi-hat pedal (you can map open, and closed is assumed to be open-4 which won’t map to blue/yellow) – for that you have to go to the TD9 (more expensive) or the Yahama DTXpress IV (same price or cheaper but the pads & sounds are not as nice). Hmm.

I think it’ll be fun to learn anyway. I’ll probably never get as good as the guy below (acoustic cover of one of my favourite drum tracks in Rock Band), but as something to do away from the PC it’s a little more productive than just watching TV or playing games, and a nice bit of variety combined with the guitar. And it probably counts as a work out

Cool, another relatively unknown (in the US anyway) British band is getting their start in Rock Band next week; Glasvegas with their track Geraldine. It’s a really good song, so great that it’s in there.

Should I be ashamed that I’m glad Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin” is in there too? Probably.

And… Spongebob. Yeah, that Spongebob, it’s not some quirky ironic punk band or something. Bizarre – one for the kids though I guess