Rock Band 3 Pro Guitar Controller

This might be a neat, cheap tool to use for MIDI guitar retuning. The
new Rock Band 3 will be coming out with 2 controllers - one is this
button faux-guitar MIDI controller type thing, which might be really
cool as far as microtonal scales are concerned. It comes with 17
"frets" per "string."

Check it out: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/10/rock-band-3-fender-mustang-pro-midi/

-Mike

I'm looking forward to this as well. $150 isn't bad for a controller in the
first place, but I'm waiting for people to get tired of the game in a few
weeks for them to start showing up used. Thanks for the article, it gives
all the info you'd need! Looks like it transmits each string on it's own
channel, so it's ready for microtonality. And apparently supports an
expression pedal, cool. It actually maps the accelerometer to midi--cool!

It also looks like the Strat has pitch to midi built in? That'll be cool to
keep costs down. I wonder how well it works for real music making.
On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>wrote:

>
>
> This might be a neat, cheap tool to use for MIDI guitar retuning. The
> new Rock Band 3 will be coming out with 2 controllers - one is this
> button faux-guitar MIDI controller type thing, which might be really
> cool as far as microtonal scales are concerned. It comes with 17
> "frets" per "string."
>
> Check it out:
> http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/10/rock-band-3-fender-mustang-pro-midi/
>
> -Mike
>
>

On 11/1/2010 4:47 PM, Mike Battaglia wrote:
> This might be a neat, cheap tool to use for MIDI guitar retuning. The
> new Rock Band 3 will be coming out with 2 controllers - one is this
> button faux-guitar MIDI controller type thing, which might be really
> cool as far as microtonal scales are concerned. It comes with 17
> "frets" per "string."
>
> Check it out: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/10/rock-band-3-fender-mustang-pro-midi/
>
> -Mike

I recently got the Mustang guitar controller, and just tried out the MIDI mode. The good news is that the strings are velocity sensitive. One drawback is that hammer-ons and pull-offs aren't supported, so you have to strum each note. There's a "synth mode" which just transmits button presses, but you need to actually strum to set the velocity, which doesn't work all that well.

However, if you look at the MIDI data it sends, each button press generates a SysEx message. So it shouldn't be too hard to write a program that reads the button presses from the SysEx data and the strumming from the note on messages, and then you can do whatever you want with the data. Does anyone have any pointers on writing MIDI software?

Now all I have to do is actually learn how to play the thing. I can barely manage the "warmup" songs (the easiest ones in the game) on hard difficulty on pro bass (which is easier than the pro guitar parts).

Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:

> However, if you look at the MIDI data it sends, each
> button press generates a SysEx message. So it shouldn't
> be too hard to write a program that reads the button
> presses from the SysEx data and the strumming from the
> note on messages, and then you can do whatever you want
> with the data. Does anyone have any pointers on writing
> MIDI software?

You don't mention a platform, but this crosses them:

http://portmedia.sourceforge.net/

The documentation leads to the source code, which isn't
encouraging.

Sysex can be a pain because they don't get processed as
single MIDI messages. I don't think Csound can handle
them so that short-cut won't work. Of course, any
synthesizer you have the source code for can be hacked.

Graham

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 10:35 AM, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>
> However, if you look at the MIDI data it sends, each button press
> generates a SysEx message. So it shouldn't be too hard to write a
> program that reads the button presses from the SysEx data and the
> strumming from the note on messages, and then you can do whatever you
> want with the data. Does anyone have any pointers on writing MIDI software?

Do you want to write a standalone hardware device, or just a program
that takes the MIDI SysEx data and spits it back out?

If the first, you're going to want to use the Arduino: www.arduino.cc

This is the greatest hardware rapid prototyping platform ever:
programmable in C, comes with libraries for almost anything you could
want, comes with USB support and RAM and an A/D and everything.

If you just want general MIDI tips, then the best thing to do is to
look up the binary-level MIDI spec and go from there. I wrote a
Javascript Scala file parser here, maybe the code will be useful for
you:

http://www.mikebattagliamusic.com/microscalegen/midigenerator.html

It also parses chords if you put them in {1/1,5/4,3/2} format.

On 12/11/2010 4:20 PM, Mike Battaglia wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 10:35 AM, Herman Miller<hmiller@...> wrote:
>>
>> However, if you look at the MIDI data it sends, each button press
>> generates a SysEx message. So it shouldn't be too hard to write a
>> program that reads the button presses from the SysEx data and the
>> strumming from the note on messages, and then you can do whatever you
>> want with the data. Does anyone have any pointers on writing MIDI software?
>
> Do you want to write a standalone hardware device, or just a program
> that takes the MIDI SysEx data and spits it back out?

Ideally I'd like something that looks like a MIDI In port to other software, that would take the MIDI In data from the Rock Band guitar and relay it to a new port. I could try something like MIDI Yoke but I don't know if that works with 64-bit Vista.