VR Midi Drums with Phase Shift Guide

[knapman [FD]]

It was pointed out the VR Drums test I posted on youtube was not mentioned on the forums. It was only a random test at the time but there is no reason to not share the information to help anyone interested in giving it a try.

The original video

 

To be clear, this is not an update to Phase Shift, this is simply a new way to play the existing game.

To answer the question of why would someone do this?
Space requirements along with the noise involved using drums.
You may only have a basic kit and want to check out other modes like pro / real drums. Or different configurations without note remapping, a VR kit could be setup for RB or GH native layouts.
Even if you have a kit, you can have an extra one for multiplayer situations.

Personally where I am staying right now I just can't have drums, I had to leave my setup behind, and with drums being my favourite mode to play, it is something I miss being able to do. So for me this is a great solution that has been enabling me to enjoy drums with a virtually silent setup.

This was tested on the Vive, but should work with suitable compatible devices.

Midi Ports

For this setup you will need to create one or two virtual midi ports. I used loopMIDI (free)
www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/loopmidi.html

You will want to do this first as it is required for the midi applications to communicate. Name the ports whatever you like, they are only for your reference.




USB Pedal

For a pedal I am using the Xbox 360 Madcatz Rock Band Portable Drum kit as it’s a compact option, but this could work with a range of USB / midi devices.

Optional step if the pedal is not a midi device.
rb2midi v0.48 (Free) - Used to convert the USB pedal to midi, the Rock Band Pedal has native support in Phase Shift already but if you want visual feedback for the pedal inside VR it is nice to hook it in.
www.mattgrounds.com/rb2midi/

You will also need to set the Input and Output devices in the top menu. The output will be one of the midi devices you setup with loopMIDI.

Optional Optional
If the pedal is feeling unresponsive you may need to adjust the Pedal Length dial to its lowest setting. This may only come up when attempting to use the Pedal as Midi in Phase Shift rather than USB, my setup doesn't do this as the Midi is only used for the VR side, results may depend on your specific configuration.




VR Drums

The original setup at the time was using Soundstage, a VR music studio. This has since gone open source and is a nice (free) option.
github.com/googlearchive/soundstagevr

I have opted to swap out Soundstage for Paradiddle (Paid). A drum specific VR application, that provides a few benefits such as support for velocity and a relatively streamlined setup.
store.steampowered.com/app/685240/Paradiddle/

At time of writing Paradiddle is early in development so the specific steps involved may change.
You will want to enable MIDI in / out inside the options, then set each Pad / Cymbal to the required note and channel for Phase Shift. The midi mappings used can be referenced in the games install folder.
\Phase Shift\settings\midi_profiles.ini

You can tweak the size and position of all the parts of the kit to suit how you like to play.



You can download a pre-configured kit setup for the standard Phase Shift midi drum profile here, some settings may still need to be adjusted locally such as the ports.

Paradiddle Phase Shift VR Drums (OLD)
Paradiddle Phase Shift VR Drums


Game viewport

The final VR step is how to view the game from inside VR.

At the moment I am using Virtual Desktop (PAID)
store.steampowered.com/app/382110/Virtual_Desktop/

This program comes with a dashboard overlay mode that allows you to display your desktop as a window inside of a VR application.

OVRdrop and Oculus Dash offer methods of doing this but I have not tried these myself.


Phase Shift

On the Phase Shift side I have just set this to run in a window at a custom resolution and set a black background to help with performance. You will need to use the standard midi link game options to map your midi device to a supported controller.

Details on midi link are in the Phase Shift Readme dwsk.co.uk/phase_shift_readme.html#midiinstruments

Here is an updated video showing the newer setup working with Paradiddle.

[Deleted]

wow - really cool thanks for posting this.

[vexbane]

the question is.........

can i play Vr drums
and my tk-11 at the same time...............were about to find out.

[knapman [FD]]

if your doing something weird, make sure its in front of a camera

[vexbane]

Jul 9, 2018 19:31:25 GMT knapman [FD] said:

if your doing something weird, make sure its in front of a camera    

For you bb? anything.

[emreparadiddledev]

Hey there! This is Emre, the developer of Paradiddle. First of all thank you so much for putting this guide up, I get a lot of questions about using Phase Shift in combination with Paradiddle, and your video and detailed steps make it so much easier for people to follow.

One user recently reported to me that some of the drum MIDI settings for the ride cymbals were messed up a little when loading the drum set in the zip file you linked to. This was a backwards compatibility issue, the problem was that every drum used to have one MIDI note associated with it, but Paradiddle currently has 2 zones for ride cymbals and the saved drum files look a little different now as a result. I dealt with the issue so that the ride cymbals just use their default MIDI notes if they encounter this, so it should work perfectly fine with the drum layout file you currently have. But I also figured I'd send you an updated drum layout file that should be more robust moving forward. Here it is, feel free to update the link if it's not too much of a hassle: drive.google.com/open?id=1SyTqhwMvAooJJ0SrMTQeR79iCR-70JyZ.

Thanks again for all your work, looking forward to the Steam launch!

[knapman [FD]]

Hi, that's really cool, thanks for sharing the updated profile. Nice to see Paradiddle has continued to progress, it is something I have been wanting to revisit to see how things are working with the Steam edition. Fingers crossed for seeing some native pedal support at some point to make the process a little easier to configure, but great to hear people are managing to set it up ok.

[ticktok]

Just ran into this, the drum kit in that link has a "1 off" problem. all the drums are on midi channel 9, and the phase shift midi config says it's looking for midi channel 9, but nothing works. Setting all of the drums to midi channel 10 made it work. Was a pain in the ass to figure that out.

Then after posting this, finding out that this has all been discussed in the discord, but no one came back to update/comment on this guide.