Drum Automation for Guitar Hero and Rock Band

Darkette · May 14, 2021

Since I’m being asked about this on a near weekly basis, I’ve decided I’ll make a thread with a bit more information on the usage of Reaper and how it works.

Reaper is essentially used for all kinds of things Audio related, but more importantly for us it includes the use of midi playback. I’ll state that this ONLY works for drums due to it having official drum brains for PS3. The reason you need this is due to the midi ports only existing on this peripheral, as of right now there’s no way you can automate guitar/bass or microphone charts and there likely never will be. With this knowledge, it allows us to download the charts from sites such as https://fretsonfire.org for use in Reaper. There’s threads with all the charts for every song every game for the ps3 afaik. For Rock Band you will need the official Mad Catz Pro Adapter for PS3 as the GH one won’t work for them games. It looks like this: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/madcatz-rock-band-midi-pro-adapter-1789558188

What you will need:

A PC with Windows

A free trial of Reaper - https://www.reaper.fm

GH Drum Brain or Pro Adapter if it’s Rock Band

Any USB to Midi cable

An account on https://fretsonfire.org for charts

The Setup:

1 - Open up reaper and go to Insert > Media file and open up the chart you just downloaded.

2 - With the file opened in reaper, delete all of the other labeled instrument charts except “PART_DRUMS” and then double click it for the full view.

3 - For Guitar hero you will want to delete all lines with notes in besides 101-95, for Rock band it’s 100-96.

3.5 - This is where things can become different depending on whether you’re using a Pro Adapter for Guitar Hero or just the regular drum brain. The idea here is to move these lines down to other certain lines so that the midi will play them back. This is done by right clicking a row and going to “note properties”. In the top box you want to change it to the new row. Below is a link with instructions on how to do this and which lines to replace them with. While doing this it’s also vital that you change it from channel 1 to channel 10 in the bottom box. Do watch the video if you’re confused. http://playingforachievements.blogspot.com/2014/04/midi-charting-tutorials.html?m=1

4 - With the newly replaced rows, you can now close that page. Connect your Brain/Adapter to the PC via the USB end of the midi cable. The midi out part of the cable goes to the midi Input in the Brain/Adapter, then connect the Brain/Adapter itself to the PS3. The adapter connects via USB, the drum Brain you should connect to the drum stand.

5 - Make sure your midi device is recognised by Reaper. Head over to where it says “PART_DRUMS” at the bottom of the screen, then click on the drop box that says “IN” and go to Record: output > Record: output (MIDI) and click it. It should now say “OUT”. Below that is the “M” symbol for mute and 2 below that it should say “Route” underneath a box. Click that and make the following changes.

Track Channels: 10

Parent Channels: 1-10

Click on <no output> and choose your MIDI

Send to original channels: 10

6 - Congratulations, you’ve now set up the chart! Start up the corresponding game and enter the song as drums. In Reaper you can go to the full view of notes again and drag the starting point to either the very first note or the start of the song, your choice. I personally had better timing consistency by pressing play on Reaper at the start of the song rather than the first note. From here it’s just trial and error until you know where to press play on Reaper.

If you have any further questions then I’ll try and respond to some of them but please don’t message me on psn about this, I won’t answer there about it. I know it sucks for people that did drumming legit, but it’s the same as save-scumming or using scripted methods on a Cronus/Titan One on other games. This is a known method for a while now, I’m merely giving an explanation on how to do it properly.

As of typing this I have already deleted all my completed tracks but here’s a helpful link with a lot of them pre-made. You only need to import the file and connect your device to reaper, the note rows are already replaced. Feel free to share any other completed tracks in this thread for other people that may want to use them!

Links

Unedited GH Charts - https://fretsonfire.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=57010

Unedited RB Charts - https://fretsonfire.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=56438

Pre-made charts (no editing needed) - http://playingforachievements.blogspot.com/2014/07/project-bombs-and-eternity-directory.html?m=1