Free App Lets Your Turn Your Guitar Hero Or Rock Band Drum Controller Into A MIDI Controller

Free Music SoftwareMusicLab Garage Drummer is a free app for Mac & PC that lets you use your Guitar Hero or Rock Band video games drum controller as a MIDI controller!

Garage Drummer consists of 2 components:

  • Virtual Midi driver providing Game Controller 1, Game Controller 2, .. MIDI inputs
  • Garage Drummer VSTi to select connected game controller as MIDI input, create/load note maps for drum pads, as well as save current settings within your songs

System requirements:

  • 256MB RAM, 10MB free hard drive space
  • PC: Windows XP/Vista/7, CPU 1GHz+, VST 2 host
  • Mac: Mac OS X 10.6, CPU 1GHz+, AU host
  • A drum controller from Guitar Hero or Rock Band PlayStation video games or compatible

Registration required.

If you give MusicLab Garage Drummer a try, leave a comment and share your thoughts on it!

10 thoughts on “Free App Lets Your Turn Your Guitar Hero Or Rock Band Drum Controller Into A MIDI Controller

  1. This is the best utility for controlling other VSTs in FL Studio with multiple console drum kits.
    I used a Rock Band 1 (Xbox 360) kit with wired USB and a Guitar Hero 5 (PS3) with wireless USB SIMULTANEOUSLY!!! It’s brilliant!

    I could not do this with any combination of the following applications:
    LoopBE1
    Max\MBS Runtime with MIDItar Hero
    LoopMIDI
    RB2Midi
    Andrew Rudson’s Drum Machine
    MidiYoke
    Rejoice
    MidiPortConfig
    Xpadder
    Joy2MIDI
    JoyToKey
    PS360MIDIDrummer – thought it’s great for one kit
    PS360ProDrum

    Nope, you don’t need those – all you need is Garage Drummer.
    Gratitude to the developer! Excellent work.

    1. Heyy, how did you get it to work? I opened up the plugin in FL Studio, but it won’t output any sound…am I supposed to do something?

      Thanks!

      1. Hey, how did you get it to show up in FL? I ran the dmg installer, it said it was complete, restarted my mac. Opened fl, rescanned my plugins and cant find it anywhere. I even reinstalled, nothing, nowhere. Any help?

  2. You actually need a software program to act as go-between. Just hook MIDI drums direct to your sequencer and, at least for my Playstation one, switch on and record from MIDI channel 10.

    You may need a console running to stop the unit continually powering off after 5 minutes though. Which maybe this application halts. (But hey, if you have the pads, you have the console,w hich you can just leave on in the corner.)

  3. Hi i have. Ps2 guitar hero drum kit (no ps2 games console) and want to use it as a drum kit on a windows xp pc using a midi/ usb converter lead is this possible ?

  4. Help.

    I installed Garage Drummer on my Win 7 laptop. The install asked me keep or discard some system32.dll files and made the recommendation that I keep them. So I answered ‘Yes to all’ in the popup alert message while installing. This caused my laptop to go BSOD. That’s right. Replacing the system32 files in Win 7 as instructed by the installer CRASHED MY ENTIRE SYSTEM.

    I restart my laptop and there is no .exe file to launch Garage Drummer. I start Ableton 8 Suite to dig for a need to use it via my DAW. Not there either.

    While I am sure this program works great (which I am still yet unable to test), how do you get this program to START? Should I be concerned about the install causing my laptop to blue screen?

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