Linux Drums

A couple or years ago I set my xbox Rock Band drums up via (Linux) Ubuntu, to play different drum samples.

Many Linux installations have occurred since now and then, so that work was lost.

Now I’m going to try and set it up again, but this time I have bigger ideas, not just my drums but I want to look into utilising my 8 button street fighter stick 🙂

Cool eh?

My beautiful darling wife gets stressed at the sound of digital drumming, so this project will have to eat into the other activities I indulge in while she is out of the house, e.g. Southpark

Here’s where I’m starting off to make the drums digital: Hydrogen Music

So the method I’ve followed

• Via Synaptic Manager, installed ‘ubuntustudio-audio’
• As Synaptic was open, I also installed ‘joy2key’

From link above:
Next I set up a simple .joy2keyrc file:

## .joy2kayrc ##
START hydrogen
-thresh 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
-X
-buttons d c s x z

Now run joy2key: joy2key -dev /dev/input/js0 -config hydrogen

From what I can tell, the thresh settings aren't that important. The -X options tells joy2key to bind to an X client window and the -buttons option assigns letters to the individual pads and the base drum pedal. The pads are assigned as follows:

button 0: Blue
button 1: Green
button 2: Red
button 3: Yellow
button 4: Orange (foot pedal)

I’m off to jam, with my headphones in 🙂