Use Rock Band Drums To Play Drums in PC

Have you ever wanted a drum set in your home so you could use it to practice drums, do some drum recordings, or just hit the drums with your heart out? If you think drums are very expensive, fear not. There is a solution.

If you own a Rock Band or Guitar Hero drum, you can hook it up to a PC and use it as a drum while you hear the sound from the speakers. How is it possible? Let me show you.

1. First, you need to hook your Rock Band or Guitar Hero drums in the USB port of your PC (I used the 360 Rock Band drums). On the device manager in Control Panel, you will get something like the one in the image below or something similar.

It will basically show as a game controller.

2. Now, you need to configure this game controller as a keyboard MIDI. MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, allows you to send signals in the form of musical notes straight from the device that sends MIDI.

First, we need to turn the drum set into a keyboard device that will send MIDI signals. To do that, we need software called Xpadder. You can Google it and download it for free. After you have installed it, run it, click on the small control button, and select New to create a new layout. There, you select the Buttons tab and hit all the drum pads and the kick pedal to create five squares.

Go to the Finish tab and click Close.

3. Next, you need to assign the five buttons to the keyboard keys. So click on the squares and select the keys. For convenience, I selected the buttons in the way shown below.

I did this because the keyboard layout is designed to match the chord layout of a piano. RTYUI are assigned side by side, and when you go to any software (I used FL Studio here), these buttons are assigned to the major chords side by side.

4. I used FL Studio here. You can use any other software if you know how a MIDI keyboard works, along with the software, open FL Studio. Create a new file. Make sure you check on Options -> and check the Typing keyboard to piano option.

5. Now select Channels -> Add One -> Fruity Drum Synth Live. The following image shows the plugin and how you should set it up.