Synthesia hero

As I said I can't wait till next weekend, so this evening I played even more with my MIDI setup. While I was searching for a program to drive my MIDI gear over the weekend I came across Synthesia. It's a free practicing game similar to Guitar Hero except that you are using a real keyboard to play real songs. Its graphics are fairly good so the fun factor is high. The only problem is that I'm more into drumming and not so much into playing the piano. Anyway, this evening I downloaded it just to try it out. It claimed that it's possible to play & practice any MIDI song. If it's true I thought I could hack it so I can control it via a drum controller as they are not so different from a MIDI keyboard.

When I first launched Synthesia it welcomed me with a nicely polished interface. I selected a song from its collection. After that it offered me the tracks of the song to select for playing. There were nice grand piano icons next to both tracks. Then I got suspicious. Instead of starting the game I downloaded a random song which I knew it had drum tracks and opened it.

Instrument selection screen of Synthesia

As you can see it has native support for the drums. =) You can select any instruments you want to play and the ones you want to play along. The only thing left is to assign the same drums for the pads and the fun begins. :) It worked nicely with both the DD-65 and the LPD8. I'm telling you, it's way better than Guitar Hero. :)

Playing the drums in Synthesia