Having played Rock Band for a year, there are few songs that are still hard on the expert drums. This required the Ion Drum Rocker, first of all, because you will never make it through faster songs that use a lot of hihat or ride with the original drums. But I got that a while ago. We can't possibly leave well enough alone, so what else could be improved?

Minimize the latency

The latency through my stereo was about 60ms. Meaning that 60ms passed between the time you played a note and the time it came out the speakers. This mostly didn't matter to the game, as long as you had calibrated it, but it really sucked for the drum fills and vocals.

Last weekend, it suddenly occurred to me that the delay was probably caused by using my 12 year old receiver to decode the SPDIF audio, via an optical cable from the Playstation. Sure enough, when I switched it to use the plain old 2 channel analog connection, the latency went down to 18ms.

This makes a big difference to a fast song, although I don't know why; the calibration is supposed to take care of it. The worst were sections with a big long roll of sixteenth notes, so maybe the mismatch between sound and action was just causing me to screw up.

It's annoying to have to change it back to play movies with surround sound, but you know what, that really doesn't matter much either.

This is hardly an original idea, but I finally went to Guitar Center and got a microphone stand, which makes it possible to play an instrument and sing at the same time. (Into the microphone, anyway.) It's surprisingly hard to sing and play both on Expert at the same time. The best I have managed is 98/91, as you see here. I wouldn't have realized it, but it takes a lot of attention to make it happy with your singing on Expert. Monitor headphones would probably help, if they helped you hear the correct pitch over the drums. So maybe that is the next addition...

Note that you might think, like me, that it would be possible to just attach a boom to a light stand that you already have (for photography). You would be wrong. Music stands all use a threaded connector that's about 1/2 inch thick, and does not work at all with any lighting equipment, which depends on studs and 1/4 or 3/8 inch tripod sockets. You could use a clamp or something hacky, but a microphone stand and boom is only $20-30 anyway, so I didn't bother.

Many people have observed that the Rock Band microphone (unlike the Singstar microphones) is just a generic USB dsp device. You can plug it in to your computer and record through it without doing anything special. So I figured I would try the reverse, and see whether the Playstation will accept any random thing that looks like a sound input. I tried this Alesis 8 track USB mixer with a condenser microphone that I had from a previous project. It works fine. So now you can use any microphone you want, turn on the built in effects, or run more than one at the same time. I'm not sure what the point of any of these things would be, but when has that ever stopped anyone?

09 Jul 2009 23:08 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments