Electronic Drums with Clone Hero

Follow these steps to get your E-Drum Kit working with Clone Hero!

People that are interested in tinkering with Midi on their E-drums may also find this interesting.

My setup includes:
Macbook Pro running High Sierra - not sure if it works with newer versions of macOS, but probably!
Alesis Surge Mesh Kit - This is a highly rated kit at a great price!

Apps I used:
Midi Monitor - Get the Midi note numbers for the drum pads
MidiStroke - Converts midi notes to key-presses (there are other apps that do this as well, but this one is free!)
Clone Hero - You'll need to get the latest public test build (v0.24.0.1555-master when I wrote this), which you can find on their Discord.

Figuring out which pad outputs which Midi note

You can skip this part if you already know the midi channel & notes for your drums, or if you have an Alesis set you can probably just use my settings!

Midi Monitor

1. Plug your drums into your Mac via USB (duh!)
2. Install Midi Monitor
3. Edit preferences, change Note Format to Decimal number
4. In the main window, under Filter, turn off Real Time (or you’ll keep getting clock messages)
5. Tap each drum pad and you should get Chan and Data, something like:
   

   Chan: Always 10 for me

   Data: Shows the note number and velocity
6. Record the note number in a spreadsheet, along with color and keyboard setting from the Clone Hero. (I used a screenshot from CH and photo of my Xbox RB drums to keep track):

Translating Midi to Keypresses

MidiStroke will press keys when you bang on your drums.

1. Install midiStroke, select your device.
2. Hit the [+] on the left side, enter the note number and channel
3. Hit the [+] on the right side, enter the correct keystroke (for example - the snare puts out a 38, which is the Red pad in RB, which maps to the S key in Clone Hero.
4. After you've entered everything in midiStroke, I suggest you exit and restart it just to make sure you settings are saved.

Clone Hero

There is plenty of info and a very active community on the CH Discord, but here is a quick-and-dirty rundown, since it took me a while to figure this out because it's not intuitive at all when using a keyboard until you've used it for a bit. (The 'A' key is used to select things, the 'S' key goes back.) You'll need to install the CH Launcher, which is used to install the PTB version - check the Discord!

1. Start CH from the launcher (this is the only way to get the public test build)
2. Hit [Space] to bring up the controls (you'll need to add a key for the Kick), Done to get back to the main menu
3. Hit [Enter] to Choose a Profile, [A], [Enter] again, [A] on Controller, up/down arrows until you see <Drums>, [A], [S]
4. Now you're on the Main Menu - scroll up/down, hit [A] to select Quickplay or Practice.

midiPassthroughMac Node JS app (the harder way to find your midi notes)

If all you wanted was to get CH working, you can stop reading now. I kept this here for completeness, because it shows how to get midi data on your Mac using NodeJS, which I thought was pretty cool.

I found this Reddit article which links to a simple Node app called midiPassthroughMac. The app uses the node-midi module. Follow the instructions from bookreader52 on downloading/running the app. It's a straight-forward example of how to use node-midi. Of course you could also just start with node-midi if you're a JS developer.

Once you have it running, you can tap on all your drums and you’ll get output like this:
[ 153, 45, 25 ]
[ 153, 45, 30 ]

• The first # is the function (153 = “Chan 10 Note on”)
• The second # is the note number
• The third # is the velocity
• See midi.org for mapping the list of channels to their decimal #.

Some other interesting info I discovered:

• Rims have a different note number
• The cymbal choke has a different function (169 = "Chan 10 Polyphonic Aftertouch")
• Using the hi-hat pedal changes the notes sent when tapping the hi-hat (makes sense)
• Smashing the hi-hat pedal creates its own notes under 169

PS - Here are a few pictures of the Alesis Surge Mesh Kit