These fancy Guitar Hero World Tour drums are velocity sensitive and have a pair of cymbal pads, which made the kit the perfect controller for realistic drumming. With the help of OSCulator, Andy managed to map the pads to work as a MIDI controller for GarageBand on his Mac. The results of his efforts can be seen in the video below:

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The cool thing about this hack is that all you need is the GHWT Wii wireless drum kit, a Wiimote, a copy of OSCulator, and a Mac with GarageBand installed to do this yourself. You can check out Andy’s complete tutorial over at Vultrix.

If you’ve got a Windows PC, you might be able to pull off something similar using this Wiimote-to-MIDI hack and a copy of an audio sequencer of your choosing.

[via lifehacker]

Seung yi Lee’s Drum Meister lets you use your fingertips to play drum sounds on little tiny pads that look just like their real-world counterparts. The app includes sampled sounds of a variety of snares, cymbals, a tom and a nice kick drum for that extra thump – 10 drums in all, and all on screen at the same time. The drums support multi-touch and you can slide your fingers across multiple drums to quickly play a riff. And since it’s a true polyphonic sampled drum kit, you can pound on ‘em all you want without the sounds cutting off.

One of the coolest things that Drum Meister lets you do is rearrange the position of the drums to suit your personal style and finger positions – plus the positions of the drums actually influences the position of the sounds with a 3D surround effect. It’s really slick if you’re listening through a pair of headphones or plugged into an amplifier.

You can even set one of the cymbals or the kick drum to be activated by a shake of your iPhone. Drum Meister also supports live recording of sessions and comes loaded with a 25 pre-recorded tracks for your enjoyment. No word on any online-sharing of tracks, but hopefully that’ll come in the near future as many iPhone music apps now have this feature.

But enough of my yakkin’. Here’s a video clip of this awesome application in action:

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Drum Meister is available now over at the iTunes App Store for $1.99 (USD), a whole lot cheaper than an actual set of drums – and a whole lot quieter, especially if you play them through headphones.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Not into percussion? Be sure to check out the trumpet playing ‘bot and the robotic DJ.

[via TechDigest]