Wii Drum Project Process

            As I began this project I talked with my professor about what would be the best way to go about it.  He suggested (after much idea hashing and discussion) that I use a device than inputs wii and outputs something else along with a program that accepts whatever the input program outputs and plays musical tones.  Boy does that sound confusing.

            In the end, after long experimentation, I chose to use midi as the middle format.  I tried several programs that accepted the wii and put out midi, and I tried many programs that were supposed to take the midi input and turn it into music.  Most did not.

            After a great deal of trial and error I came across a program called wii-to-midi.  The program accepted wii and output midi.  Then I searched through programs trying to find one which accepted midi.  Ironically my final choice already resided on my computer.  Garage Band. 

            Once I set Garage Band to accept the same input which wii-to-midi put out, I was ecstatic when I heard several drumbeats as I accidentally moved the wiimote.  Unfortunately, I could only create two types of drum beats, and those only by pushing the B and A buttons at the same time as when I swung the wiimote.  I was very disappointed when I tried for a long time to get more tones and was unsuccessful.

            So I had to backtrack.  I had found out the joys of Garage Band so I stuck with that, and therefore sought another midi output program.  I was blessed (after several more hours of search) to find a tutorial which supposedly showed how to use the program wiinstrument to control Garage Band using a midi interface.

            Terribly excited and nervous of another promising program which might fail, I began to follow the instructions.  Unfortunately the instructions only got me part way, and they needed some tweaking.  I began to loose hope.  But then, wonder of all wonders, after I had tweaked and prodded the ideas behind the instructions to their limit.  And then…nothing…nothing…VICTORY!!!  Drum tones came from my computer.  One tone? Not again!  But I realized that by pushing the arrows on the remote I could produce an entire range of tones!  Excited with my victory I played with the drums for quite some time, after which I sought to find out if the results were repeatable.  They were.

            The basic procedure for completing the wii drum set is at the link provided below under tutorials.  It needs to be altered depending on the version of the computer, but I had great success with it. This tutorial is only mac supported, and I am pretty sure it only works with OSX, if you have any other type of computer the links below should provide you with a start.  Enjoy!