Almost a year after my
previous post, I
felt inclined to spend another Sunday (this one was chilly rather than
rainy) working on my script to integrate the drumkit of Guitar Hero
World Tour for Wii within a MIDI environment. And wiigh2midi got, if
not a rewrite, then at least a few enhancements since I last mentioned
it here.
- The buttons are now handled. The “cross-stick”, the A and B buttons, + and -, Home, 1 and 2. And if the Wiimote is plugged into a drumkit, you get even more buttons: another set of + and -, plus another mini-joystick. Thunder! Martians! Bubbles! Yay for sound effects!
- A side-effect: the drumkit is no longer even necessary. Run several instances with different configurations, give a wiimote each to a bunch of kids, and get them to perform a batucada by pressing the big round button in time. I tried and failed, but it was due to the age and over-excitedness of the bunch of kids in question rather than the technical side of things.
- Yeah, configurations. It's all in a nice
.inifile now, and you can define several “kits” (input-to-MIDI-note mappings) in different sections, and select which kit to use when running. - The configuration can also define which MIDI device to send events to, and which channel to use. My use case is that sometimes I want to use my GHWT drumkit as a set of extra pads and send the MIDI stuff to my “real” electronic drumkit (over an USB adaptor), and sometimes I just want to send the MIDI events to a software synthesiser such as Hydrogen, to have a second, cheaper, lighter drumkit.
- Speaking of Hydrogen: since the MIDI-to-instrument mappings are
somewhat strange in there, I provided a template Hydrogen file with
a reasonable drumkit that matches the example configuration if
wiigh2midi. - Hey, you know, three toms, two cymbals and one pedal are really a small kit, even for beginners. And what about open/closed hi-hats? Well, we could, you know, split some of the pads so they can produce different “sounds” depending on context. Like, maybe if you hit the left pad real soft, you get a cross-sticks sound, but you get the standard snare drum sound if you hit it a bit harder (or very hard). And the open hi-hat could be obtained by hitting the yellow cymbal harder, with normal hits still sounding like closed hi-hats. And since the crash cymbal is usually hit markedly, while the ride is usually more of a soft-to-medium hit, you guess what we could do with the orange cymbal. Well, scratch the “could” there, that's exactly what we do now. So my cheap drumkit has hi-hats that open, a cross-stick sound on the snare drum, ride and crash cymbals, a bass drum and two toms. Not so bad.
It's still not something that I'd put in everyone's hands, but it's coming to be seriously usable. I wonder if there'd be any interest in me packaging that and uploading it to Debian? It would need some cleanup first (and a more generic name, since it's far from restricted to Guitar Hero controllers or drumkits), but I guess it could be useful. Ping me if you're interested.
Update: Wiigh2midi has been renamed to Wiimidi, and has its dedicated page at Wiimidi.
