Real(ish) Drums for Guitar Hero World Tour
January 5, 2009 · File under Fun and games
I jumped through a lot of hoops to try to use my Roland V-Drums in place of the Rock Band drum controller, with unsatisfying results. Guitar Hero World Tour makes it awfully easy though - the controller has a MIDI IN port. If you plug it, it will play, but it can also be easily be improved upon. In a nutshell, I mapped other pads so they could also be used, and, more importantly, mapped both the rim and head of each pad so you don't have to hit a particular part to trigger.
I assigned the pads as illustrated here:
The perhaps controversial and/or innovative idea was to reverse the crash cymbals from the more obvious left-right configuration. I did this because orange is used for crashes when the right hand is on the hi-hat, and yellow is when the right hand is riding the ride, and in real life, you'd use the crash closest to hand. I'm trying to get as close to playing the actual drum part as possible here.
Whether to assign the middle tom to blue or green is matter of preference, I suppose.
To program my drum module, a Roland TD-3, I chose a kit I didn't mind scrambling the MIDI numbers on, then hit EDIT > CONTROL and arrowed to the note number setting. The settings are summarized here:
| Pad Color | Instrument | MIDI Note | MIDI Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|
| red | snare | 38 | SNR:H02 SNR:R02 |
| yellow | hi-hat | 46 | HH:H03 HH:R03 CR2:H10 CR2:R10 |
| blue | hi tom | 48 | T1:H04 |
| orange | ride | 49 | RD:H11 RD:R11 CR1:H09 CR1:R09 |
| green | low tom | 45 | T2:H05 T3:H07 |
| purple | kick | 36 | KIK:H01 |
Note that you have to keep your foot off the hi-hat pedal. (Or unplug it.) (Or assign to note number 50 and always keep your foot on it.)
