Bobby Blackwolf

I am proud to have made my mark on the Joystiq Podcast!

Congrats on all the success over the years.

It's a straight translation. You never use the top right cymbal in RB2. The top left cymbal becomes the second pad.

The TL;DR short answer is "No". I have already put my drums back in their traditional practice space area and most likely will not put them back in a position to play Guitar Hero again.

Essentially, since you have a TD-12, I can tell you the mappings. Red = Snare, Blue = T1, Green = T2, Yellow = HH, Orange = CR1. (I had to modify my drumset to make my ride cymbal CR1 so it would be on the right rather than on the left.)

The biggest issue I have is that GH:WT doesn't exactly always use the same sound for the note, primarily with the yellow pad. Sometimes it's a Hi-Hat, sometimes it's a crash cymbal. To activate star power in the game, you have to hit "both cymbals." This is NOT easy to do with a real drumset because you're expected to hit both the hi-hat and the crash cymbal - and if you're crosssticking like you're supposed to now you have to rearrange your arms and STILL hit the hi-hat. Very awkward, and much easier to do on the video game controller.

Bottom line to me: Guitar Hero and Rock Band are video games. They are intended to be played with video game controllers. They are not intended to be real musical instruments. I think the ION kit also isn't worth it. RB2 was designed to be played with four pads, GH:WT is designed for three pads and two cymbals. While it was a fun experiment to try to use my professional drumset with the games, it just isn't practical and sometimes make the songs harder than they need to be.

E3 Guy: Hate to break it to you, but the drums aren't second to none, at least in terms of working as intended. Mine work worse than my RB pads ever did - I can't even pass the in-game tutorial with them. I have to RMA them. Granted, I would not have been so upset over this had Activision not gone around saying "When their instruments break, you can buy ours" so I had expectations that they'd *work* out of the box.

At least my guitar works fine, but the drums, to me, aren't "second to none." I had to plug in my professional kit just to try to play GH:WT with the note chart the devs intended!

They plug into the MIDI-in jack of the GH:WT drumkit (it's on the left behind the MIDI brain in my picture) and the GH:WT drumkit interprets the MIDI notes and translates them into video game notes.

Since there's no post about the instrument compatibility matrix, I figured I'd share this tidbit: I hooked up my electronic drumset I use professionally to the MIDI-In jack of the GH:WT drumkit for the 360. It worked out of the box - although since I have the high-end Roland V-Drums (TD-20-S) it was actually sending more data than GH:WT wanted. On my V-Drums, the sound changes based on where on the head you hit - closer to the rim sounds less full than the center of the head. This also sends a different General MIDI note. Since GH:WT expects a specific MIDI note, if you don't hit pretty close to the center of the head, it won't register.

But other than that, it worked out of the box with no fiddling. Plug in the MIDI cable and go.

But the reason I bring this up is for the instrument compatibility chart - the MIDI setup ALSO worked in Rock Band 2. And it actually seemed like it worked BETTER in RB2 than it did in GH:WT.

As an aside, my green pad is not sensitive enough, you have to practically slam the stick down to get it to register, which causes crosstalk with the orange cymbal. I'm RMA'ing it tomorrow. Quite disappointed I can't play GH:WT the way the developers intended.

(Oh, and just to prove that yes, I am telling the truth about trying my drums with GH:WT - http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwolfga/2974461045/ - that was my living room yesterday.)

Does the "Quest for a LBP Beta Code" count as a meme? Would be an interesting level, trying to get to a floating string of numbers and letters as it constantly eludes you...

I would create a level based on percussive instruments that you would use to open up the next area. Swinging a mallet to hit a gong, jumping on a drumstick to make it hit the snare drum, and obviously a large rolling bass drum (it's a drumroll...get it?)

They're a real production company that IGN hired to create the spoof. If you look on their site, they mainly do SFX-laden short films on a "modest budget" (so they say.)

The funny thing is, if anyone with two eyes looks at Gibson's patent, it has NOTHING TO DO WITH GUITAR HERO. It is a patent on a method of plugging a REAL GUITAR into a device that then plays a concert from a DVD that has 3D models. The only "interactivity" in the patent is that you can play along with the prerecorded DVD with your own guitar while wearing a VR helmet.