rockband instruments and midi

When I first heard they were going to make Rockband, the first thing I wondered is if they would allow a free jam mode. How cool would it be if you and a few other players could just pick up the instruments and trigger sounds that weren't related to one of the "preset" songs?

So now that the game is out its awesome but it doesn't seem to have this feature (yet?) so I set about trying to wire the controllers into Ableton Live so I could trigger sounds of my own.

One thing that really makes this easy is that the Xbox Harmonix controllers are all joysticks and are natively supported on XP. This makes hooking up stuff to them dead easy.

Unfortunately, none of the current joy to midi programs on windows handle more than one joystick very well.

The first program I tried was called joytokey. This doesn't use midi, it just maps the controller input to keystrokes which you can use to trigger Live events.

First I just mapped different sounds to each pad in impulse and played them with the fret buttons. The problem is that this feels weird, probably because it doesn't use the string switch thingie. My right hand didn't have anything to do. Also, it would cut off notes if I played more than a few at a time. I believe this is a limitation of the keyboard interface, not joytokey or rockband.

So I decided to use a joy to midi program called rejoice to avoid the note limitation of joytokey. After playing with it for a few minutes I realized I could map multiple midi events to one joystick events. To get strumming you need the notes to be triggered by the strum, so I triggered all the pads in impulse at once with the strum paddle, and then I unmute the fret sounds with the fret buttons. This simulates the sound of rockband pretty well.



links
ableton demo, works for as long as you like but you can't save

ableton thread on rejoice - this programs site has disapeared and there's almost no trace it was ever written. no help either!

rejoice download - handles a single device well though

joytokey - for joystick to keystrokes. Works simultaneously with rejoice. It will jam up and cut off your notes when more than three notes are played

VIMIDIJoY- one joystick at a time

Livesticks - does not support the hats (pov switch) which you need for the strum paddle on the guitars, but handles multiple joysticks with precision. Difficult to set up. Possibly works on mac