Projects/RockBandDrumCircle
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[edit] Rock Band Drum Circle
[edit] Goal
To allow a group of people to jam in a drum circle using cheap Rock Band drum controllers that are found at thrift stores.
This was to be displayed at Art|Everywhere closing night on Granby Street in Norfolk Virginia.
[edit] Theory
A netbook running a python script reads the controllers and passes the data to a midi synthesizer module. In this case, it was the Yamaha RM1X. The RM1X is gracious enough to allow any drum kit to be assigned to any midi channel, something that Roland seems to really dislike.
Each drum set sends note commands on a different midi channel, so each drum set could have it's own sounds.
In addition to this, the user can hit two buttons on the controller portion of the drum kit to change the set of sounds that are sent.
[edit] Code
The code is complete! It is available at:
http://users.757.org/~ethan/pics/geek/projects/drums2midi/
[edit] Reception
[edit] MakerFaire 2011
The first beta test of the project was at the MakerFaire in Raleigh, NC for 2011. Kids seemed to love it. This featured only a few of the sets, and there were no issues.
[edit] Art Everywhere Closing Night 2011
The second deployment happened at the Art Everywhere closing night. Once again, kids seemed to love it. Other people came by to jam out, and thought it was neat. One or two people directly asked about how it worked, which was refreshing.
