OSCulator Forum » Chitchat

Guitar Hero Drums as MIDI instrument

(29 posts)

  1. syfish
    Member

    Hi, im a newbie to Osculator and use a Macintosh. I'm trying to find a way to use Wii Guitar Hero drums as a midi drum kit. So far all i've been able to do is map midi drum notes to the buttons on the wii remote and nunchuk, but when the drum kit is connected to the wiimote, none of the hits get registered, so i cannot map drum notes to any of the pads. Looking at forums i've been directed to Osculator and Junxion, but hit the same problem with both programs. Has anyone any knowledge of a solution to this using Osculator, to enable me to use the drum kit as a MIDI instrument.

    many thanks

    Posted 1 year ago #

  2. camille
    oscltr cookr

    Hi,

    Unfortunately, there is not enough information available for me to know how to make the drum kit work with OSCulator. While the Wiimote is a supported device, the drum kit is another piece of hardware making it incompatible with OSCulator for the moment being …

    Best,
    Cam

    Posted 1 year ago #

  3. syfish
    Member

    Hi, seems like the new version 2.8.3 has brought "almost" what i need to get the Wii guitar hero drum controller working as a midi instrument into Garage Band or Logic Express. This was fantastic news, but am trying to clear up, what seems to me a configuration issue, if there is any way of helping me out here, that would be fantastic and there would be a definite donation on the way for this great software. The drum controller is seen and all the drum pads can be mapped to sounds from the midi drum pool, but am having trouble setting the velocity parameters, so that a light hit will have a low volume response and a heavy hit a louder response. If i set the event type of the wii/2/drums/pad/R/trig message to MIDI Note and select 38 D1, i get a snare sound from the red pad. However there is no sensitivity so unless the pad is hit at a constant velocity some notes do not register. If however, i set the event type for the red pad message to MIDI Note w/Params and the value to wii/2/drums/pad/R/velo and set the wii/2/drums/pad/R/velo message to Note Params and the value to velocity, i get all the sensitivity range, but the only sound i can hear is like a rim shot tap and i can't seem to change it to a snare sound. The parameters upper and lower values don't make any difference to the sound that i hear and all pads produce the same "tap" sound apart from the bass pedal which produces a tom sound, oddly enough. Do you know what would be the correct settings so that each drum pad/pedal makes the appropriate sound with velocity sensitivity, the hi-hat cymbal ideally would need to be able to have light hits produce a closed hi-hat sound and heavy hits produce an open hi-hat sound, and the last cymbal be able to produce a ride sound with light hits and a crash sound with heavy hits. I was looking at another post where they were saying that the upper and lower pitch values in the parameters field apply to all notes, will i have to adopt the same kind of solution with duplicated notes to enable each pad to have a different MIDI note value. Many thanks for you help with this.

    Cheers

    Simon

    Posted 8 months ago #

  4. camille
    oscltr cookr

    Hey Simon,

    The solution is to use the event "MIDI Note -> Channel Velocity".
    In every velo fields you put a channel velocity event.
    In every trig you put a MIDI Note and choose the note you want to trigger.

    That should work as intended!

    Best Regards,
    Cam

    Posted 8 months ago #

  5. jordan314
    Member

    Hiya,
    Camille thanks for the awesome program! I bought it last night, it does work with the guitar hero drums. Unfortunately, they're not that responsive. If I play too fast, they just stop registering, and if I play more than one drum at once the velocity sensitivity gets off. I demonstrate using them here:
    http://jordanbalagot.com/blog/2009/07/09/video-blog-using-guitar-hero-world-tour-wii-drums-as-midi-controllers-on-os-x-with-osculator/
    Do you guys think this is a hardware constraint? The rock band drums, which are USB, do not have this problem (but are not velocity sensitive either).
    Thanks though, this is an amazing program!

    Posted 8 months ago #

  6. camille
    oscltr cookr

    Hi Jordan,

    This is great to see a demo of the drums! Even since I've written the drum code, I've never had the chance to see it running!

    I think the triggers should be precise in the range of 0.01s, so what you're experiencing is not normal. Also, it's should not be unregistering if you play a lot of notes. Actually, the way it works, you could play tons of notes, and it wouldn't change anything. What I mean is that a note doesn't put an additional "load" on the controller which would make it unregister.

    I've worked on a precise timing of the inside of OSCulator, but it was a long time ago, maybe I could check to see if it's not possible to make it better. That's one part of the issue. For the "unregistration", I would take a look at the Wiimote. Could you please send me its Bluetooth address? If it has been bought recently, chances are it is not totally compatible with OSCUlator, and that I have to make an adjustment.

    In any case, it's true that you will have much more timing precision with the USB version. Over Bluetooth, the Wiimote sends 10 time less informations than a USB device would …

    Thanks for the video!!!

    Best,
    Cam

    Posted 8 months ago #

  7. jordan314
    Member

    Thanks for your quick response Camille! I may try the Xbox guitar hero world tour drums then, since you say they're so much more precise.
    My wiimote is old, the bluetooth address is 00-19-1d-66-79-72.
    I have another one, 00-19-1d-61-7b-91.
    Thanks!

    Posted 8 months ago #

  8. fimp
    Member

    Hi,

    In any case, it's true that you will have much more timing precision with the USB version. Over Bluetooth, the Wiimote sends 10 time less informations than a USB device would …

    When using the drum set with Guitar Hero: World Tour I don't recall there are any problems with rapid drumming. So it doesn't seem like Bluetooth is the bottleneck.

    Posted 8 months ago #

  9. neo_gn6
    Member

    Hey guys

    It cannot be a bluetooth limitation since the drums works perfectly with the wii; it registers every single notes/rolls. When I open a quick look window in Osculator on a drum pad, it registers notes with perfect timing, but fails do register another one if too close. It actually just ends up signaling a single longer note during the drum roll. Maybe if the default sustained release of a note could be shorten would solve the problem? Otherwise than that, the integration is close to being perfect! Keep up the good work.

    Posted 8 months ago #

  10. camille
    oscltr cookr

    Hey neo,

    you are right i think the integration is rather good and there is this timing problem that I will work on when I'm back from holidays.
    Thanks for describing the issue a bit better!

    Cam

    Posted 8 months ago #

  11. jordan314
    Member

    Hey Camille,
    I already bought Osculator but I'd buy you a Wii drum set if you want to help get this working. Guitar hero Wii drums cost $40 on ebay. If you got it working I think it would rival $1000 electric drum sets! If you're interested send me your mailing address, or paypal if you want me to just send you the money for it. My email is my username @ yahoo.
    Thanks! :)
    Jordan

    Posted 7 months ago #

  12. camille
    oscltr cookr

    Hi Jordan,

    I really appreciate your offer, thank you!
    Actually I have a pretty good idea of what is going wrong, and I plan to fix this problem as soon as I'm back home on tuesday. Again, thanks for the offer, I'm pretty sure we'll do without the real drum, but if it's not possible I'll just go and buy a real set at the llocal store.

    Cheers!
    Cam

    Posted 7 months ago #

  13. camille
    oscltr cookr

    Hey Jordan,

    Could you please try something:

    When the Wii Drums are plugged in, please uncheck every setting in the Wiimote drawer: Pitch/Roll/Yaw, X/Y/Z, IR or IR Raw. None must be checked.

    Are the drums still working?
    If yes, do they still suffer from the jitter?

    Thank you very much in advance,
    Camille

    Posted 7 months ago #

  14. camille
    oscltr cookr

    Hello Jordan, Hi neo_gn6,

    Update: please don't try what I suggested before :-)

    I'm trying to figure out if the problem lies on the MIDI side of the WIi Drums side.

    I have a question to neo_gn6:

    When I open a quick look window in Osculator on a drum pad, it registers notes with perfect timing, but fails do register another one if too close. It actually just ends up signaling a single longer note during the drum roll.

    Does it stop registering on a single pad, or on all the other pads as well?
    When does the normal behaviour resumes itself?

    Thanks for the details, guys.

    Cam

    Posted 7 months ago #

  15. jordan314
    Member

    Hey Camille,
    It happens just on a single pad. If I watch the event view in logic, I see note on-offs up to a certain tempo, then when I'm doing like 16ths no events occur, and then as I slow down again to eighths or quarters note on and offs appear again.
    Thanks,
    Jordan

    Posted 7 months ago #

  16. camille
    oscltr cookr

    Thanks Jordan, I think this is a very good tip.

    For you information, I initially thought the internal event messaging was flooded by the amount of informations the Wiimote is sending. I wrote a simple test program that sends simultaneous events at a regular interval and also a torrent of "garbage" events. The good news is that OSCulator processes and fire the events quite precisely, even under a heavy load.

    This means the problem lies in the Wiimote driver. So I checked the documentation for the Wii Drums and found there was a possibility that, if a pad was hit two times very quickly, the note would not be set to off before the next one.

    I will check the driver and see what fix can be made.

    Posted 7 months ago #

  17. jordan314
    Member

    Hey Camille,
    I found this youtube video of a guy talking about a double tap problem with the guitar hero drum set. With the updated version of your program this is the same problem I'm having now. I can't quite understand him, he's either saying that instead of note on and note offs, the set just sends two note ons, or that it sends a note on for one pad but also for all the other pads. I'm not sure, but the behavior I'm having with your program now is exactly the same as in the video. He wrote a MIDI filter program to filter the double hits out:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpkiy8aOZ_Y

    Posted 7 months ago #

  18. camille
    oscltr cookr

    Hi Jordan,

    This video gives us an important clue on why we are having a problem.
    It seems the Wii Drums are not designed to work as a note-on/note-off controller, just like a regular MIDI drum kit.

    In my previous post, in the paragraph before the last one, I said that I was feeling that there was a possibility that a note-on and note-off events could be "garbaged", and it seems this video is confirming that Guitar Hero designer chose to send ONLY note-ON messages, which is a bit annoying since a MIDI note is made of ON and OFF messages.

    I am still believing there is a way to make the Wii Drums work as expected, but I still need to find a kit on which to try. I will eventually buy one new next week, since there are none on ebay, at least for delivery in Europe.

    Best,
    Cam

    Posted 6 months ago #

  19. camille
    oscltr cookr

    Hi Jordan,

    Just a quick message to let you know that I have bought a Wii Drum Kit (and the Guitar as well). I'll work on fixing the drums this week.

    Cam

    Posted 6 months ago #

  20. Hatchinatore
    Member

    just throwing it out there since the drums are not designed to send off commands, and since the notes arent sustained it might be possible to just tell osculator to auto send an off command after x seconds, letting the wiimote just send on for each pad. just a quick thought.

    Posted 6 months ago #

  21. camille
    oscltr cookr

    Hi everybody,

    I have fixed the problems with the Wii Drums and Guitar (there was a problem with the notes being stuck on or off).
    I would love to have some testers to see if everything is fixed before releasing a new version.

    Please tell me by email (camille at osculator dot net) if you are interested.

    Best,
    Cam

    Posted 6 months ago #

  22. camille
    oscltr cookr

    Dear users,

    Thanks for your feedback, the beta session is now closed.
    I will be reviewing your feedback and release a new version in a couple of days.

    Cam

    Posted 6 months ago #

  23. jordan314
    Member

    Hey Cam, hey all,
    OSCulator works great for the GH drums now! I made this video using OSCulator for the world tour drums and JunXion for the rock band drums:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZT5v5HGQa0
    Thanks!
    Jordan

    Posted 4 months ago #

  24. camille
    oscltr cookr

    WOW, that IS impressive !!!
    Great drum samples and playing here !
    I did not even know it was working like that …
    Thanks Jordan.

    Posted 4 months ago #

  25. robert_cal
    Member

    Has anyone gotten this working with Garage Band? I am having trouble with getting the midi signal to be seen by Garage Band.

    Posted 3 months ago #

  26. vultrix
    Member

    robert_cal, didn't spot this topic so accidently started a new one. This might help you:

    http://www.osculator.net/bp/topic/240

    Posted 3 months ago #

  27. robert_cal
    Member

    This was great. Thanks, Robert

    Posted 3 months ago #

  28. ohrobot
    Member

    I am a bit confused now. Is the new wireless Wii Band Hero drum set different?
    Is it working with Osculator to transform it's signals to MIDI with a reasonable latency?

    Posted 2 months ago #

  29. camille
    oscltr cookr

    As long as it is wireless it should be ok:
    check out this post about Band Hero drums (working ok) : http://www.osculator.net/forum/topic/206#post-1191

    cheers,
    cam

    Posted 2 months ago #

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