Paradiddle News

Thank you so much for supporting Paradiddle! If you're enjoying your time with the app and excited about what's to come, I would really appreciate it if you wrote a review on Steam. It doesn't even have to be long - any review helps in proving that Paradiddle is trying to be the most flexible, responsive and user-friendly VR drumming app out there.

The second update to Paradiddle is out, and it's a big one! Here's what's new in this update:



This is an exciting new change that'll let you get more out of your drums moving forward in Paradiddle. You'll notice that if you're in the menu mode, every drum now has a button hovering on top of it. Clicking this will reveal the drum sound options, which currently let you change these settings:

• Max Volume
  
• Pitch
  
• MIDI In/Out On/Off Toggle
  
• MIDI Note
  
• MIDI Channel
  

These settings are saved and loaded with your recordings and drum sets,so you won't have to change them all over again every time you load your sets. Just a heads-up: it's very likely that there'll be visual changes to these buttons (such as how they're positioned), this is just a first-pass at this concept that will be improved upon.



It's finally here! Paradiddle now has support for MIDI in/out.

MIDI Out: MIDI out support lets you send MIDI signals to any audio software that can take in MIDI, letting you use your own samples and apply your own effects to turn Paradiddle into a much more powerful audio creation tool. Each drum has its own default MIDI note and channel that can be customized, and will send proper velocity information based on how hard the drum is hit. Here's how you can set up Paradiddle to send MIDI out and communicate with a digital audio workstation (DAW) like Ableton:

• First, create a loopback MIDI port using something like loopMIDI.
  
• Open your DAW and set it up to accept MIDI and play back your samples.
  
• Now launch Paradiddle, and in the app, go to the Options tab. Under MIDI, select your MIDI output to be the loopback MIDI port you just created.
  
• So now we've set up Paradiddle to send MIDI, but we also need to enable MIDI output for the specific drums we want. Expand the drum sound options by clicking the button hovering over the drum, and click on 'MIDI Out Off' to toggle it to On.
  
• That's it! Now if you play on this drum, it shouldn't create a sound within the app, but should send a MIDI signal (and play a sound through your DAW) instead! You can also change the MIDI note on your drum to change what note gets played on your DAW when that drum is hit.
  

MIDI In: MIDI in support lets you integrate any peripheral that can send MIDI signals to Paradiddle. This lets you do things like use electronic drum pedals that can send MIDI, and the drum in Paradiddle will sound different based on the incoming velocity. Here's how you can set up Paradiddle to accept MIDI messages from a peripheral like e-drum pedals. For my own testing, I was using the Roland KT-10 Kick Trigger Pedal plugged into the Yamaha DTX502 Drum Module. The drum module was then connected to my PC via USB, and sending MIDI signals to it:

• Launch Paradiddle and go to the Options tab. Under MIDI, select your MIDI Input device to be your peripheral (in the example case above, this would be the DTX502 Drum Module.)
  
• Now Paradiddle will be listening to MIDI input, but we need to set up a drum to accept these messages. For this you need to know what MIDI note your peripheral will be sending. Here's a handy chart that shows these for percussion instruments. From here we see that our drum module will be sending a MIDI note of 36 when we use our pedal to trigger the bass drum.
  
• All of the drums in Paradiddle are already set up to accept MIDI notes that correspond to their type, so the bass drum will already have its MIDI note set to 36. Let's say we want to play the bass drum in Paradiddle using our e-drum pedal. Place a bass drum in your scene, click on the button over the drum to expand the drum sound options. Click on 'MIDI In Off' to toggle it to On.
  
• That's it! You should notice that now when you press on your e-drum pedal, the bass drum will play, properly making use of the velocity information as well. If you wanted another type of drum to play when you hit your pedal, you can do this by enabling MIDI in on that drum, as well as setting its MIDI note to be the incoming MIDI note (36 in our example.)
  

As I mentioned earlier, the drum options (including the MIDI settings for each drum) are saved/loaded with drum sets and recordings, so you won't have to go through setting the drum options to enable MIDI in/out every time you launch the app. Just create your set the way you want and save that, and load that back whenever.

Limitations: With all of that being said, the current MIDI feature has a few small limitations and I just wanted to give you a heads-up. But don’t worry, all of these will be addressed in additional patches/updates in the near future:

• Global MIDI settings (the MIDI Out/In Device settings) currently aren’t saved, so you’ll currently have to select your MIDI Out/In Device each time you launch Paradiddle. This will be saved in a future update.
  
• There’s currently only one MIDI note per drum, so things like hi-hat openness or hitting the center versus the edges on a ride cymbal won’t change what note gets sent. Again, I’ll fix this in an upcoming update so you can get more note variation out of those drums.
  
• It’s not possible yet to open/close the hi-hat through incoming MIDI messages, but this will also get addressed in a future update.
  
• Right now Paradiddle is set up to accept incoming MIDI signals from all channels.
  
• Outgoing MIDI signals are only sent through one channel, which is the MIDI channel that’s specified on that drum’s settings.
  

You can now choose the Audio Output Device and Driver that's used by the system. If you go to the Options tab, you’ll see that under Audio, you can set your Output Device and Driver. Currently the two choices for the Audio Output Device are WASAPI (the default for Windows when using Paradiddle) and ASIO, but feel free to let me know if you'd want to see support for any other options as well. I’ve tested this using ASIO and ASIO4All specifically as my output driver, and there might be a slight improvement on latency if you switch over to it. I’d be interested to hear what other benefits you’re all observing or getting, if you prefer to switch over to ASIO.

I also wanted to say another thanks to the community, because I became aware of ASIO and ASIO4All through your posts in the Discussion Forums, and that’s what led to this feature being added. So thanks for being supportive and helping me improve the app even further!

Limitations: The only limitation with this is that the Audio Output Device and Driver settings currently aren’t saved, so you’ll have to set it up again the next time you launch the app. But this will be addressed and fixed in an update soon.



This was another feature that was requested by multiple people on the Discussion Forums. In the Options tab, there’s now a Haptics button that’ll let you tune your haptics intensity. It’s possible to dial it all the way down to 0 if you don’t want any vibrations at all. This setting will get saved, so you won’t have to set it up again the next time you launch Paradiddle. Another slight change that’s related is that the default haptics intensity for the Vive was tuned to be smaller.


Those are all the changes introduced by this update! I’ll share another post soon about what changes you can expect to see soon. Over the next month and a half, I’ll be shifting my focus a little from adding new features, to improving upon existing ones and making some design/quality of life improvements.

As always, feel free to let me know or post on the Steam Discussion Forums if you have any other comments or questions. And thanks for supporting Paradiddle! I'm incredibly excited to see that the Paradiddle community is already rapidly growing, and to see how you're all using the app. If you're on Discord, you might want to join the Paradiddle Discord group as well. I'm always active on there, and others in the group are also always really helpful.

Emre
[email protected]
Official Paradiddle website: http://paradiddleapp.com
FAQ: http://paradiddleapp.com/faq
Reddit: http://reddit.com/r/paradiddle
Join us on Discord!: https://discordapp.com/invite/wjHnTVr
Paradiddle drum covers Youtube playlist (your cover could be on here too!)

Here's an update on what's coming next to Paradiddle. Some of these were slated for a late November release, but as features kept getting added this ended up taking a lot more time overall to manage the new complexity. Hopefully you won't mind hanging in there for a little longer - I've already implemented all of this, but am just doing additional testing until I can make sure it's ready to be released. This update will be going out some time in January.



I'm extremely excited to announce that MIDI In/Out support will be in the next update for Paradiddle! MIDI out support lets you send MIDI signals to any audio software that can take in MIDI, letting them use your own samples and apply your own effects to turn Paradiddle into a much more powerful audio creation tool. Each drum will have its own default MIDI note and channel that can be customized, and will send proper velocity information based on how hard the drum is hit.

MIDI in support will let you integrate any peripheral that can send MIDI signals to Paradiddle. This lets you do things like use electronic drum pedals that can send MIDI, and the drum will sound different based on the incoming velocity.

This has already been implemented, but I'm currently doing more testing to make sure I iron out some of the kinks. However based on my testing so far, it's been very satisfying to finally use Paradiddle with an e-drum kick pedal and trigger some fun samples in Ableton!



Several of you have asked for ASIO support on the Discussion forums, and this will be in the next update as well. Users will be able to choose the Audio Output Device and Driver that's used by the system. Currently the two choices for the Audio Output Device are WASAPI (the default for Windows when using Paradiddle) and ASIO, but feel free to let me know if you'd want to see support for any other options as well.

I've done some preliminary testing with this, and I haven't seen a noticeable difference in latency between WASAPI and ASIO, but I understand that the ASIO settings can be tuned even further on the user's end. So after the next update it'll be interesting to hear how many of you can hear a noticeable difference in latency.



As I mentioned earlier, users will now be able to use additional pedals such as e-drum pedals through MIDI in. The way I'm currently doing this is by having an e-drum kick pedal going to a drum module, which is then connected to the PC. However, I've seen a few of you ask whether you could directly connect your pedal to the PC, or through an audio interface. Support for this will also be in the next release.



On top of these big features, the next update will also introduce some basic drum sound controls, such as controlling the max volume and the pitch of a drum. If you have any requests for what additional controls you'd like to see for drum sounds, feel free to let me know!

As always, if you have any comments, requests or feedback, you can post in the discussion forums or email [email protected].

- Emre
[email protected]
Official Paradiddle website: http://paradiddleapp.com
FAQ: http://paradiddleapp.com/faq
Reddit: http://reddit.com/r/paradiddle
Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/wjHnTVr
Paradiddle drum covers Youtube playlist (your cover could be on here too!)