Use Rock Band Drums to play drums in PC

Have you ever wanted to have a drum set in your home, so you could use it practice drums or do some drum recordings or just hit the drums with your hearts out. If you think drums are very expensive then fear not. There is a solution. If you own a Rock Band or Guitar Hero drum, you can hook it up to 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 into a keyboard MIDI. MIDI or Musical Instrument Digital Interface allows you to send the signals in the form of musical notes straight from the device that sends MIDI. At first we need to turn the drum set into a keyboard device which will send MIDI signals. In order to do that we need a software called Xpadder. You can Google it and download it for free. After you installed it, run it and 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 padel to create five squares.

 

 

Go to the Finish tab and click close.

 

3. Next you need to assign the 5 buttons with the keyboard keys. So click on the squares and select the keys. For convenience I selected the buttons in the way shown below.

 

 

The reason I did this since 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 any other software if you know how MIDI keyboard works along with the software. Open FL Studio. Create new file. Make sure you check on Options -> and check in 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 up.