Rock Band with Electronic Drums (HOWTO)

[Aelius27]

**UPDATE** : Picture of solder locations posted to Page 4.

I read the rules, and saw that we weren't supposed to talk about hacks. I assume that they mean SOFTWARE hacks that help people cheat, rather than hardware hacks to help us enjoy their game more, but I could be wrong.

Harmonix, I mean no offense. I'd really like to not be banned, and just have this thread deleted if my interpretation is wrong. This is the only thread I will talk about this on from here on out, so if you delete this thread mum is the word from here on out.

Now that I've hopefully provided some form of disclaimer that might keep me from being banned...

This will be my thread that I'm brain dumping my HOWTO on. It will unfold over time as I put together the pictures/video to help you guys out.

Here is my initial video, for those that want proof and haven't seen it yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdD2i2r6tFw

My system has changed, and frankly my drumming has gotten better.

Seriously though, at the time of the video I was using the BasicX processor. That processor doesn't natively support the MIDI baud rate, so it was a pretty serious hack. I also found that processor to be a little unreliable, and had some problems with triggering. I'm waiting on a UART that supports the correct MIDI baud rate currently, because I would like to return to that system...

In the meantime, I've moved to a PC based system for the time being. The PC system is 100% reliable. I got the "Flawless Drummer" achievement using it, and I'm currently playing through the game on Hard. My latency is low enough that you can't tell the difference between my drums and the Harmonix drums at all. We had a Rock Band party at my house with ~ 15 people or so on Friday using only my Roland Drums. Everyone loved it and we had no problems with needing different calibrations.

I'm inputing MIDI to the PC via a PCI based sound card with a gameport, and a gameport to MIDI cable. I wrote custom software on the PC to process the MIDI messages and pulse pins on the parallel (LPT) port. Then I have a small circuit that uses opto-isolators for the switching in order to isolate the PC electronics from the drum/360 electronics.

I don't really see a business opportunity that scales well here, so you can put away your fear and wallets. I'm planning on making everything I've written and discovered freely available. Because I actually do like money, at the end of all this, if you really feel moved to throw money at me, you can paypal me.

[Aelius27]

Okay, first post of actual content...

The first stage of my hack was to determine my general strategy. Simulating the output of a Piezo-electric sensor seemed non-trivial to me. So the first thing I check was if you could play the game using the buttons on the little controller section in the middle of the drums.

Turns out you can (try it at home!). This makes the modification of the harmonix drums trivial. This makes it simply automating some switches, which is great.

So, the middle controller section uses a standard technology that most controllers these days use. They have interlaced but non-connecting solder pads on the circuit board, and a conducting material mounted on a rubber membrane over those pads. When you press the button the rubber membrane is deflected which causes the conducting material to touch both of the solder pads and connect them.

I wanted my center section to continue to be usable as a controller, so I used my multi-meter to find solder locations on the circuit board that didn't interfere with the buttons ability to work.

For those that want to skip ahead, turns out all the buttons are connected to ground on one side, and have a signal line connected to one of the pins that connect the chip board to the main circuit board on the back side (compared to the location of the button pads). With no power applied I used a multi-meter to find those pins and soldered on there.

Unfortunately I have work and plans tomorrow night, so I'll take my controller apart and post pictures of my work on Saturday. I'll probably also put together a YouTube video that covers this part of the hack.

This information should be enough to get the most clever of you up and working soon. I'm also working with a friend who purchased a MIDI relay device to get his working in that way, for those that want a little simpler solution, that will be a good direction to go, but they aren't cheap.

[ragmaster]

I am dying to use my Alesis Kit, and i know im not alone. The MIDI relay options sounds clean. Although i have no idea what that means .

Count me in for 250 bucks!

Got to be a market for this eventually, seeing that rock band might be the greatest drum training device ever in the history of mankind. Its made me realize, i suck.

[zolon]

Ok. Few simple questions, which I am sure you will answer when you have time.

1. Parts list - aka, What drum set? What bread bored? What chip again? so on and so forth.

2. Will any MIDI controller work?

3. Time involved for setup and break down of the contraption?

I am sure I will come up with more as I see your info, but I am currently looking at VSets, and I want to make sure I get one that is PROVEN to work.

Thanks.

[Aelius27]

I will detail as much as I can, and answer pretty much any questions anyone comes up with as I document each step, but here is your answers for now:

1) My drum set is an older Roland TD-6 I bought off craigslist specifically for this project. Any drum set with a reliable MIDI out should work. I'm planning on making the software configurable from a text file in case you need/want to change the MIDI channel numbers, or adjust/support additional instruments. I've added a bit to my kit so I now have 2 crashes, with both mapped to green.

I'm comfortable saying anything by Roland that outputs MIDI is going to work fine. The other major brands should also work fine, though I'm not an electronic drum expert by any means...

Bread boards are simple prototyping tools. Any of them will work, that is like asking "which brand of plyers?".

The chip I was using was the BasicX-24, though I'm not sure it's up to the task. As I stated above I'm currently using a full blown PC, though it's an older one, running Windows XP.

The full parts list I'll post when I get to documenting that stage of the process.

2) MIDI controller? Are you asking about the electronic drum brain? Anything that outputs MIDI signals should work fine. The brain is responsible for dealing with the triggers though, so if you had a bad one you might get double triggering, etc. You don't want that.

On the other side I'm using a cheap PCI sound card with a gameport. The gameport driver is uniform on all those cheap soundcards, and was written/maintained by Microsoft, it's stable and fast. I tried using a MIDI-USB thing at first, but had random note misses when playing that I attributed to lag/jitter. That seems to have been fixed when I went to the PCI interface. It was cheap at a local computer retailer, like $15.

3) I haven't really moved them. Currently my system is a headless PC, connected by cable to the Roland drums, and by cable to the breadboard, which is connected by cable to what remains of the Harmonix drums. Setting up the Electronic drums is by far the most time consuming part of the equation.

[zolon]

Sounds great. I have just started the barter with my lady on spending $1500 on a set of drums. :P

MILLS Music near where I live does price matching with almost any place, and I have been looking at the TD6-SW Tour Set already. So this fits with your designs.

http://www.google.com/products?q=rol...&oe=UTF-8&um=1

2) And yes, in a way. I have a ton of MIDI devices already, just no actual drum triggers. So I was thinking I could use one of them for testing the setup until I can afford the VSet.

I am looking forward to the layout diagrams you have setup and any other information on this. Thank you so much.

[Aelius27]

Sure, that set should work fine.

I got my set for ~ $400 used on craigslist after I sold the amp that came with them, but I already had a drum pedal and throne.

Of course, since then I've bought a shiny new (more comfortable) throne, a nice Pintech trigger to use for the snare, and I'm waiting to receive a nice Pintech mesh headed kick trigger I won on ebay so I can use my double pedal. But I choose not to talk about how much this project has cost me with my wife.

[zolon]

Understand that.

I already have a throne. My kick pedal snapped YEARS ago though, from a old set that I have had since I was 4. So I will need to pick up a new one of those unless it comes with the set.

I found a set on craiglist, but I have always been twitchy about buying electronics used.

[zanzabez]

That has to be the best thing I have seen yet!

[brianwi]

I don't want to get banned either, but made a much more expensive way work (and I'm the friend mentioned in the first post), so am posting here especially as a lot of the credit goes to Aelius27 anyway, cause he helped me troubleshoot big time. (Given that the cost of the solution is ~$400 total, I doubt many will do it.)

For those who aren't as engineering inclined (although it will still take a little) and have a few extra dollars laying around, I took a suggestion from ZenNye at ScoreHero (ZenZen here I think), and bought the MidiSolutions.com R8 Midi Relay. I have a set of Roland TD-6SW drums.

What I did:

1) Midi Out Cable to Midi In on the R8
2) Program the R8 (using the awesome free software from their site) to however you'd like your drums to work. I've appended how I programmed them at the bottom. When you program you want to send a 40ms pulse on NOTE ON.
3) Buy 4 RCA to exposed (and tinned) wire cables. I used the 6 foot ones I found at Radio Shack. You'll also need 4 RCA to 1/4" mono converters (so you can plug this end into the R8). *(In reality anything that gets you from the 1/4" jack on the R8 relays to bare wires will work just fine - pre-tinned just makes it that much easier and you're not wasting one end of the cable when you cut it off).
4) Buy 1 1/4" mono to 1/8" mono cable. This is for the bass pedal.
5) From here, I'm not going to detail it as Aelius27 will likely do a much better job , but now you have to take apart your drums and get down to the motherboard. The only wires that will matter are the bass pedal and the one that goes to USB on the XBOX360. You are free to cut the rest (at your own risk of course).
6) Then solder the wires onto where the buttons go on the motherboard. This is difficult. If you don't know how to solder, find someone who does, and use FLUX. If you still want your controller to work like Aelius27 did, then use his connections. Otherwise you can see under the buttons what looks like two 'E's facing each other. The small circles above and below are where you make the connection. The circle that has a small trace coming out of it is where you solder the center wire of your cable too. The other circle appears to just join with the large grounding plane. This is the ground and where the outer cable from your RCA cable should be attached. Use a multimeter if you have any doubts or this doesn't make sense.

7) Now plug the cables into the R8 based on how you programmed it in step 2.

8) Once this is done, take the cable from #4 above and plug it into the bass pedal plug in that is still attached to the motherboard.

9) Turn everything on and it should work.

10) I'm able to do some of the fastest parts of songs with no issues and no delay. The relays in the R8 are super fast (2ms) so I didn't need to adjust my calibration for this to work.

MIDI NOTE / DRUM / COLOR ASSIGNED

22: Hi-Hat Rim (Closed) YELLOW
26: Hi-Hat Rim (Open) YELLOW
42: Hi-Hat (Closed) YELLOW
44: Hi-Hat Pedal Unused
46: Hi-Hat (Open) YELLOW

38: Snare RED
40: Snare Rim RED

48: Tom 1 YELLOW
50: Tom 1 Rim YELLOW
45: Tom 2 BLUE
41: Tom 3 GREEN (for fast runs down the toms?)

36: Kick ORANGE

49: Crash 1 GREEN
55: Crash 1 Rim GREEN

51: Ride BLUE
53: Ride Rim BLUE

Again KUDOs to Aelius27 for making me want to do this in the first place and his superior skills in helping me make my solution work correctly.

I am waiting on a larger mem card for my camera and then I'll post a video that shows me playing, etc.