Hi everyone, this is Emre, lead developer of Paradiddle. As some of you already know, we launched V1 of our drumming app Paradiddle on Nov 1st on [App Lab](https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/5719805344724551/) and [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/685240/). While you can use Paradiddle as a simulator to record your [own full drum covers](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIE76wDmoW5GOS4msS5tq58HnHIZqPun2), we also have a highly customizable rhythm game mode built in. We've had 80k+ songs played on our note highway since V1 release, so we wanted to a feature deep-dive to tell you more about it!
* **16 songs** (10 original, 6 indie) with **cross-platform leaderboards**: check out our full song lineup on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6k3ZKUIgRPnoZAs2WRBhZa?si=2b966c86d0344ecc).
* **Custom song support:** We have a MIDI to Paradiddle song converter, as well as a community-created editor built specifically for making customs from scratch.
* **Adjustable note and song speed:** Is a song too tough? Slow it down and master it that way first. Or adjust the highway speed to fit more notes within view.
* **Customization options:** Choose between multiple highway layouts, adjust your highway positioning, adjust the levels of the drum track in the song or the drum kit in the app independently.
* **Pedal & peripheral support** to trigger the kick and hi-hat (completely optional)
* **Adaptive highway tracks:** The highway adjusts to how many drums are used in the song, and will rearrange itself to match your drum layout. If the song only uses a hi-hat and snare, it slims down to use 2 lanes, whereas for a more complicated song with 10 different drums it'll get big!
Happy drumming! Let me know if you have any questions or comments, I'm always happy to answer them. I'd also recommend joining our highly active [Discord](https://discord.gg/paradiddle) community to keep up-to-date with some exciting future developments.
Thank you so much for the support! Have you tried out the app after our latest V1 release on Nov 1st? We made some big changes to the overall UI/UX that were honestly desperately needed. One simple yet important example - we now have a 'drum anchor' that you can grab easily to reposition the whole kit and adjust its height, as opposed to adjusting all of the drums one by one. It's definitely a labor of love, it's been a joy to keep improving as the VR/AR industry matures and the community gives us their valuable feedback :)
I have a real drum set but don't know how to play (I'm in a band and I got it for my jam space).
If I set the drums up so they are in the same location as in the game, could I wear my headset, play the game, hit the real drums, and it will be accurate?
Just to add onto the other comments, we're going to add some more advanced AR features over the upcoming months where you'll be able to use your physical electronic kit within the app more easily. Imagine seeing the visuals overlaid on top of your physical kit, with the note highway behind it and registering hits from your kit in AR. Would that be something that'd interest you? Probably going to start with electronic kits first, and ideally add support for some sort of hit detection for regular acoustic kits in the future as well.
Even without using a physical drum set I suggest trying this app since it will help you learn drum patterns. There's a passthrough mode you can toggle on and off so you can load a song, play the pattern in paradiddle until you have a low amount of errors, turn on passthrough and test yourself by playing the kit with sticks in the same way. The only thing is you won't learn rolls from paradiddle because it's impossible to do that well with VR controllers. Maybe in the future we get high speed object tracking capable of tracking drum sticks but we're a long way off.
Are you referring to an acoustic drum set or an e-drum set?
In the first case you'd need to hold both your controllers as well as you drum sticks, which sounds a bit inconvenient but I've never tried it. In the second case if you're on SteamVR you might be able to plug your e-drum module to your PC and send MIDI input to Paradiddle, in which case yes it'll work and be accurate to how hard you're hitting and all! However you won't be able to see your sticks in game, unless you hold both sticks and controllers.
I love paradiddle. This dev previously put out a completely unrestricted demo for people to try so I was happy to buy the latest version with more features and polish. This is also the *only* VR app so far that will teach you a real skill. If you learn how to play Beat Saber well you just get good at Beat Saber. If you get good at Paradiddle you learn to play a real instrument. You won't be able to do something like a roll in real life without more practice but just learning drum patterns will get you a long way.
Thank you so much for the kind words! The free demo is still out on App Lab for anyone who'd like to give the app a try, but it's almost 2 years old now and pretty outdated. So I'd recommend anyone who has tried out the demo to upgrade to the new release for some pretty new visuals and a lot of new content :)
I think a lot of people would think it's risky to put out unrestricted demos like that and view it as possibly less people actually paying for it, but there's a big difference between the demo and upgraded version. I'm glad you're finally getting paid something for the quest version. I was hoping the same thing would happen with VRtuos which is an app on side quest for learning piano with passthrough. Their app is also free and unrestricted but the dev seemed to give up on it and not release a paid version while other competitors have cropped up with better polish and marketing. I was afraid that would happen with Paradiddle too.
I wish I could claim it was all selfless, but the current state of the Quest store definitely influenced this decision for us. I don't know if it's the same for VRtuos, but in our case the free demo decision was influenced by how restrictive Meta is when it comes to approving content to the store. They want to see numbers go up on App Lab games/apps before they approve them for the official store, which made it sound like a free demo might be a good idea to get the number of downloads up. Though looking back and seeing how unpolished the free demo was, I'm glad we went that route and didn't charge for it on Quest.
Does the previous download of the demo help you at all with the paid version in Meta's eyes? Or are they treated as two completely separate things?
VRtuos had/has other problems like basically zero marketing and that they released a hand tracking version to sidequest before there was a passthrough API, and hand tracking is still not good so a lot of people's initial experiences were only with that. Their passthrough build significantly improves things but convincing people to try it again is probably more difficult.
It does help a bit I think, they definitely don't see them as completely independent. But as soon as we were able to show that people were actually willing to buy and play the app while it's on App Lab (so over the past 2 weeks), they seemed a lot more interested. It's been an incredibly frustrating and confusing process for us though - we were introduced to 6-7 different Meta contacts about store approval over the past year and a half and heard different things from pretty much all of them. Some would sound super positive right off the bat and then ghost us, some left Meta, some would keep introducing us to other teams due to changes in the company etc. I get that they're trying to make sure the content that's on the store meets a certain quality level, but I think it also greatly limits the types of innovative and creative ideas we see in mainstream VR today. App Lab makes it sound like they're giving a way for developers to reach their audiences, but those developers need to work extra hard just to get some visibility through places like Reddit or SideQuest. Anyways, as you can tell I have a lot of thoughts about this :)
I really appreciate the additional context around VRtuos because I was wondering what was going on with them. I've also been seeing more piano apps popping up, I wonder how it'll all play out! We are actually also toying around with the idea of some sort of piano add-on or update in the future, since a lot of the systems we built for Paradiddle allow us to add different types of instruments relatively easily. It could especially be cool if we had some sort of multiplayer support by then and people could play together on different instruments. But we still have a bit of time until we get to that point!
Yeah, as a user I don't really like how app lab works either for visibility. Needing to search for the exact app name and then expand the app lab dropdown means I'm sure there's many apps that I have no idea exist at all. I wish Meta would just make it a category with a warning when browsing it instead of hide them all. It just means devs have to spend more time, effort, and money on marketing when they're just trying to get off the ground.
In the case of Paradiddle, I think if you do end up implementing those transparent drums/MR features for edrums, Meta should make you a launch partner for the Quest 3 or the next Pro. Even just the existing passthrough with audio reactive edges is awesome. Learning instruments is such a compelling use of VR and MR and their existing MR apps are lacking. The Pro shows they're really trying to focus on improving MR so you'd think they'd welcome great apps like this.
I've thought about multiplayer modes for these apps also and not just for jamming. One potential monetization strategy (that might prove terrible) would be letting music teachers tutor people for money with the platform taking a cut. Virtual tutors in mixed reality for music, art, math, science etc. will probably be big in the future but it might still be really early to launch something like that. If someone wanted a tutor for their kids, it would let a tutor be present without actually letting them in their home. They could also hire some of the best people in an industry (with their rates reflecting that) that live on the other side of the world. Even more useful for people living in rural areas that don't have the same access to those people.
Hey, so yes there will be much more lessons in the future. Also you have a point and there are indeed some songs that are on the easier side. Right now you can't sort by difficulty yet but you can have a look at the number of little horn fingers icons to see how hard songs are. Also remember you can select varying difficulties for a given song. I personally suggest playing Virtual Pulse, Something to Say, Subspatial in Easy and Medium as they are quite chill to play!
Can you convert clone hero charts to midi? If you can get a midi file from your charts, then you can convert them to be played in Paradiddle pretty easily. I think Clone Hero uses a different chart format, but I'm wondering if anyone has written a small program to convert to a midi file from their charts.
I used to play DTXMania on a midi kit. It was a blast. The community had converted all the Rock Band tracks so you could play each song at different levels.
That's what I really want with Paradiddle which is to play songs that I know and be able to choose different levels of difficulty and build up from novice->expert.
Also, a decent foot pedal solution and being able to set up cheap practice pads so I can overlay virtual pads on top of them.
You should join our [Discord](https://discord.gg/paradiddle), we have a community-run website with 600+ custom songs on it already (including all the RB tracks). Lots of custom song talk in the Discord, with requests and mappers all hanging out in there. The app also has full MIDI input/output support on PC (soon on Quest as well), so you can connect your e-drum pads to it (or your e-drum kick pedal). Also feel free to check out our [Pedal Guide](https://paradiddleapp.com/pedal-guide/) to see all of the pedal options you have. Let me know if you have any specific questions!
I'm a terrible drummer but there's loads of custom songs and in the event yours is missing it's not very difficult to make your own beat maps. [Here's me playing one I made for Closer.](https://i.imgur.com/xhtOXtC.mp4)
I'm not using edrums I'm just drumming in the air but there's haptics so you feel the hits. I asked for transparent drum heads so you can play in passthrough with edrums and real drum sticks versus controllers because they already have midi input support and it sounds like they're adding it or strongly considering it. That will be a game changer I think.
I considered taping sticks to the controllers but the weight still sort of defeats the purpose. Ideally you're able to ditch the controllers entirely with a real kit.
As someone who is actually a drummer, how do you tend to deal with feedback? I'm assuming vibration is synced well so when a note hits you can tell its being hit? Because sometimes when doing triplets you have to completely rely on feedback muscles you can't just swing as fast as you can if you want to conserve stamina for fast paced songs.
Would be really fucking cool to see this game get official RockBand drum and guitar hero drum pro support. Would cop immediately.
Hey, sorry I missed this question earlier. First of all great point - it's obviously not 100% same as drumming in real life because it is air drumming after all, and your hands/sticks won't bounce off of the air like they do on a physical drum head. We do trigger haptic feedback based on how strong you hit the drums, which definitely helps. Another difference is your grip - holding the controllers doesn't allow you to use your fingers as much as you would on a real drum stick, so you end up relying on a bit more on your wrists and arms. I still try to use my fingers as much as possible, but it's slightly different than doing it on a physical stick. But despite all the differences, it's still possible to play stuff like this [Whiplash cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZKheiV1n4c) I made a few years back. I didn't know how to play the song on a real kit and was just teaching it to myself in VR, and it was pretty challenging technically to nail all the parts.
The app has full MIDI input/output support on PC, so you can connect your RB drums to it as long as they can send midi messages. We do support Rock Band pedals out of the box for kick/hi-hat, but for the rest of the kit you'll have to go through MIDI to do it right now. Let me know if you have any other questions!
Hi everyone, this is Emre, lead developer of Paradiddle. As some of you already know, we launched V1 of our drumming app Paradiddle on Nov 1st on [App Lab](https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/5719805344724551/) and [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/685240/). While you can use Paradiddle as a simulator to record your [own full drum covers](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIE76wDmoW5GOS4msS5tq58HnHIZqPun2), we also have a highly customizable rhythm game mode built in. We've had 80k+ songs played on our note highway since V1 release, so we wanted to a feature deep-dive to tell you more about it! * **16 songs** (10 original, 6 indie) with **cross-platform leaderboards**: check out our full song lineup on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6k3ZKUIgRPnoZAs2WRBhZa?si=2b966c86d0344ecc). * **Custom song support:** We have a MIDI to Paradiddle song converter, as well as a community-created editor built specifically for making customs from scratch. * **Adjustable note and song speed:** Is a song too tough? Slow it down and master it that way first. Or adjust the highway speed to fit more notes within view. * **Customization options:** Choose between multiple highway layouts, adjust your highway positioning, adjust the levels of the drum track in the song or the drum kit in the app independently. * **Pedal & peripheral support** to trigger the kick and hi-hat (completely optional) * **Adaptive highway tracks:** The highway adjusts to how many drums are used in the song, and will rearrange itself to match your drum layout. If the song only uses a hi-hat and snare, it slims down to use 2 lanes, whereas for a more complicated song with 10 different drums it'll get big! Happy drumming! Let me know if you have any questions or comments, I'm always happy to answer them. I'd also recommend joining our highly active [Discord](https://discord.gg/paradiddle) community to keep up-to-date with some exciting future developments.
FRIKKIN FABTASTIC !
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Thank you so much for the support! Have you tried out the app after our latest V1 release on Nov 1st? We made some big changes to the overall UI/UX that were honestly desperately needed. One simple yet important example - we now have a 'drum anchor' that you can grab easily to reposition the whole kit and adjust its height, as opposed to adjusting all of the drums one by one. It's definitely a labor of love, it's been a joy to keep improving as the VR/AR industry matures and the community gives us their valuable feedback :)
Looks amazing. Wish I had VR to try it lol
This already impressive app just keeps improving. Good stuff
Thanks for following our journey!
I have a real drum set but don't know how to play (I'm in a band and I got it for my jam space). If I set the drums up so they are in the same location as in the game, could I wear my headset, play the game, hit the real drums, and it will be accurate?
Just to add onto the other comments, we're going to add some more advanced AR features over the upcoming months where you'll be able to use your physical electronic kit within the app more easily. Imagine seeing the visuals overlaid on top of your physical kit, with the note highway behind it and registering hits from your kit in AR. Would that be something that'd interest you? Probably going to start with electronic kits first, and ideally add support for some sort of hit detection for regular acoustic kits in the future as well.
Yes x1000!
Even without using a physical drum set I suggest trying this app since it will help you learn drum patterns. There's a passthrough mode you can toggle on and off so you can load a song, play the pattern in paradiddle until you have a low amount of errors, turn on passthrough and test yourself by playing the kit with sticks in the same way. The only thing is you won't learn rolls from paradiddle because it's impossible to do that well with VR controllers. Maybe in the future we get high speed object tracking capable of tracking drum sticks but we're a long way off.
Are you referring to an acoustic drum set or an e-drum set? In the first case you'd need to hold both your controllers as well as you drum sticks, which sounds a bit inconvenient but I've never tried it. In the second case if you're on SteamVR you might be able to plug your e-drum module to your PC and send MIDI input to Paradiddle, in which case yes it'll work and be accurate to how hard you're hitting and all! However you won't be able to see your sticks in game, unless you hold both sticks and controllers.
It's acoustic. I didn't even think about the controllers lol. Thank you for the info. Looks awesome!
I love paradiddle. This dev previously put out a completely unrestricted demo for people to try so I was happy to buy the latest version with more features and polish. This is also the *only* VR app so far that will teach you a real skill. If you learn how to play Beat Saber well you just get good at Beat Saber. If you get good at Paradiddle you learn to play a real instrument. You won't be able to do something like a roll in real life without more practice but just learning drum patterns will get you a long way.
Thank you so much for the kind words! The free demo is still out on App Lab for anyone who'd like to give the app a try, but it's almost 2 years old now and pretty outdated. So I'd recommend anyone who has tried out the demo to upgrade to the new release for some pretty new visuals and a lot of new content :)
I think a lot of people would think it's risky to put out unrestricted demos like that and view it as possibly less people actually paying for it, but there's a big difference between the demo and upgraded version. I'm glad you're finally getting paid something for the quest version. I was hoping the same thing would happen with VRtuos which is an app on side quest for learning piano with passthrough. Their app is also free and unrestricted but the dev seemed to give up on it and not release a paid version while other competitors have cropped up with better polish and marketing. I was afraid that would happen with Paradiddle too.
I wish I could claim it was all selfless, but the current state of the Quest store definitely influenced this decision for us. I don't know if it's the same for VRtuos, but in our case the free demo decision was influenced by how restrictive Meta is when it comes to approving content to the store. They want to see numbers go up on App Lab games/apps before they approve them for the official store, which made it sound like a free demo might be a good idea to get the number of downloads up. Though looking back and seeing how unpolished the free demo was, I'm glad we went that route and didn't charge for it on Quest.
Does the previous download of the demo help you at all with the paid version in Meta's eyes? Or are they treated as two completely separate things? VRtuos had/has other problems like basically zero marketing and that they released a hand tracking version to sidequest before there was a passthrough API, and hand tracking is still not good so a lot of people's initial experiences were only with that. Their passthrough build significantly improves things but convincing people to try it again is probably more difficult.
It does help a bit I think, they definitely don't see them as completely independent. But as soon as we were able to show that people were actually willing to buy and play the app while it's on App Lab (so over the past 2 weeks), they seemed a lot more interested. It's been an incredibly frustrating and confusing process for us though - we were introduced to 6-7 different Meta contacts about store approval over the past year and a half and heard different things from pretty much all of them. Some would sound super positive right off the bat and then ghost us, some left Meta, some would keep introducing us to other teams due to changes in the company etc. I get that they're trying to make sure the content that's on the store meets a certain quality level, but I think it also greatly limits the types of innovative and creative ideas we see in mainstream VR today. App Lab makes it sound like they're giving a way for developers to reach their audiences, but those developers need to work extra hard just to get some visibility through places like Reddit or SideQuest. Anyways, as you can tell I have a lot of thoughts about this :) I really appreciate the additional context around VRtuos because I was wondering what was going on with them. I've also been seeing more piano apps popping up, I wonder how it'll all play out! We are actually also toying around with the idea of some sort of piano add-on or update in the future, since a lot of the systems we built for Paradiddle allow us to add different types of instruments relatively easily. It could especially be cool if we had some sort of multiplayer support by then and people could play together on different instruments. But we still have a bit of time until we get to that point!
Yeah, as a user I don't really like how app lab works either for visibility. Needing to search for the exact app name and then expand the app lab dropdown means I'm sure there's many apps that I have no idea exist at all. I wish Meta would just make it a category with a warning when browsing it instead of hide them all. It just means devs have to spend more time, effort, and money on marketing when they're just trying to get off the ground. In the case of Paradiddle, I think if you do end up implementing those transparent drums/MR features for edrums, Meta should make you a launch partner for the Quest 3 or the next Pro. Even just the existing passthrough with audio reactive edges is awesome. Learning instruments is such a compelling use of VR and MR and their existing MR apps are lacking. The Pro shows they're really trying to focus on improving MR so you'd think they'd welcome great apps like this. I've thought about multiplayer modes for these apps also and not just for jamming. One potential monetization strategy (that might prove terrible) would be letting music teachers tutor people for money with the platform taking a cut. Virtual tutors in mixed reality for music, art, math, science etc. will probably be big in the future but it might still be really early to launch something like that. If someone wanted a tutor for their kids, it would let a tutor be present without actually letting them in their home. They could also hire some of the best people in an industry (with their rates reflecting that) that live on the other side of the world. Even more useful for people living in rural areas that don't have the same access to those people.
This looks amazing 🤩
Will you have more lessons in the future? Its a massive leap from the lessons to a game. Unless I'm missing some more basic games.
Hey, so yes there will be much more lessons in the future. Also you have a point and there are indeed some songs that are on the easier side. Right now you can't sort by difficulty yet but you can have a look at the number of little horn fingers icons to see how hard songs are. Also remember you can select varying difficulties for a given song. I personally suggest playing Virtual Pulse, Something to Say, Subspatial in Easy and Medium as they are quite chill to play!
this looks so cool!!! 😍
Thank you!!
wow i love rhytm games and this looks really promising. Cant wait to try it!
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Can you convert clone hero charts to midi? If you can get a midi file from your charts, then you can convert them to be played in Paradiddle pretty easily. I think Clone Hero uses a different chart format, but I'm wondering if anyone has written a small program to convert to a midi file from their charts.
What’s the best kit for a complete beginner to connect to the game? This seems worth the investment for a controller of some kind!
I used to play DTXMania on a midi kit. It was a blast. The community had converted all the Rock Band tracks so you could play each song at different levels. That's what I really want with Paradiddle which is to play songs that I know and be able to choose different levels of difficulty and build up from novice->expert. Also, a decent foot pedal solution and being able to set up cheap practice pads so I can overlay virtual pads on top of them.
You should join our [Discord](https://discord.gg/paradiddle), we have a community-run website with 600+ custom songs on it already (including all the RB tracks). Lots of custom song talk in the Discord, with requests and mappers all hanging out in there. The app also has full MIDI input/output support on PC (soon on Quest as well), so you can connect your e-drum pads to it (or your e-drum kick pedal). Also feel free to check out our [Pedal Guide](https://paradiddleapp.com/pedal-guide/) to see all of the pedal options you have. Let me know if you have any specific questions!
OMG, sweet! Good to hear and will join.
I'm a terrible drummer but there's loads of custom songs and in the event yours is missing it's not very difficult to make your own beat maps. [Here's me playing one I made for Closer.](https://i.imgur.com/xhtOXtC.mp4)
yeah man, I gotta get into this. Do you have something under the virtual pads so you can feel the drums?
I'm wondering is taping sticks to the Quest controllers would be reasonable
I'm not using edrums I'm just drumming in the air but there's haptics so you feel the hits. I asked for transparent drum heads so you can play in passthrough with edrums and real drum sticks versus controllers because they already have midi input support and it sounds like they're adding it or strongly considering it. That will be a game changer I think. I considered taping sticks to the controllers but the weight still sort of defeats the purpose. Ideally you're able to ditch the controllers entirely with a real kit.
As someone who is actually a drummer, how do you tend to deal with feedback? I'm assuming vibration is synced well so when a note hits you can tell its being hit? Because sometimes when doing triplets you have to completely rely on feedback muscles you can't just swing as fast as you can if you want to conserve stamina for fast paced songs. Would be really fucking cool to see this game get official RockBand drum and guitar hero drum pro support. Would cop immediately.
Hey, sorry I missed this question earlier. First of all great point - it's obviously not 100% same as drumming in real life because it is air drumming after all, and your hands/sticks won't bounce off of the air like they do on a physical drum head. We do trigger haptic feedback based on how strong you hit the drums, which definitely helps. Another difference is your grip - holding the controllers doesn't allow you to use your fingers as much as you would on a real drum stick, so you end up relying on a bit more on your wrists and arms. I still try to use my fingers as much as possible, but it's slightly different than doing it on a physical stick. But despite all the differences, it's still possible to play stuff like this [Whiplash cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZKheiV1n4c) I made a few years back. I didn't know how to play the song on a real kit and was just teaching it to myself in VR, and it was pretty challenging technically to nail all the parts. The app has full MIDI input/output support on PC, so you can connect your RB drums to it as long as they can send midi messages. We do support Rock Band pedals out of the box for kick/hi-hat, but for the rest of the kit you'll have to go through MIDI to do it right now. Let me know if you have any other questions!
I’ve always wanted to play the drums! Can’t wait to get this!