So I would like to focus on different drum peripherals for my final paper – using semiotics – and am showing what I have so far. Here are the peripherals I am looking at:
| Guitar Hero Drum Set | Rock Band Drum Set |
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One of the things that I just noticed when I was looking at these peripherals remediates other real-world drumming equipment:
Drum Set (kinda like Guitar Hero)
Quad Toms (kinda like Rock Band)
So I don’t know where this will lead me, but I thought I would share and see if you have any other insights as well.
(^^)V
2 comments
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November 16, 2009 at 9:17 pm
CJ
I think its interesting to look at quad toms because quads are used for marching primarily (right?) and yet “rockband”’s use drum kits (mostly). plus “rockband”’s are usually cool and marching band is not really seen as the coolest thing ever (4 years experience).
One thing the “rockband” kit reminds me of is being a kid and putting pots all around me to bang on (which my mom had to LOVE). Not an accurate representation but a makeshift drumset for the non-drummer i was/am.
November 17, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Dane
Interesting. I’m a total n00b when it comes to Guitar Hero versus Rock Band, but I do notice that they both make interesting assumptions about what constitutes “drumming”.
When drumming in Guitar Hero, there’s a 1:1 left-to-right mapping of the notes that come to you on the fretboard, and the artifacts that you “wail” on in from of you. Despite the “cymbals” being on a different plane, they’re still offset horizontally in such a way that one could reasonably discern the left-to-right mapping in practice. The mapping “zig-zags” between the plane of the drums and the plane of the cymbals.
However, as an experienced musician (and as an inexperienced player of Guitar Hero), this flat hierarchy of which artifact to “wail on” bothers me. A drummer typically keeps the beat with the snare drum and high-hat, and the crash cymbals are typically reserved for transitions from one chorus to another, drum fills, or other artistic flourishes.
What’s more, unlike the interface for Guitar Hero, the typical drum kit is far from symmetrical. The high-hat is off to the left, the snare drum next to it, and your toms arranged in a semi-circle surrounding you from your front to right. Rock Band is further guilty of this symmetrical abstraction, embracing the marching band arrangement as CJ pointed out, by flattening everything to a planar arrangement of toms.
I can see why they made the design decisions they did, in the interest of simplicity, as well as allowing full creative license to those who “compose” the fretboard note arrangements. If one were to more closely organize the digital drum set around a real drum set, and compose in that manner, it would mean the player would spend 90% of his or her time wailing on the high hat and snare. Not that exciting, eh?