Paradiddle lets you play drums in VR, on the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality headsets. You can drag and drop drums to create your ideal drum set, play on realistic sounding drums that react to different parameters such as how hard the drums were hit, and record & share your creations with others. Enjoy practicing your skills without having to worry about certain limitations of real drums, such as noise, having a dedicated space, and cost.

Paradiddle is available on Early Access on Steam, and will soon be available on the Oculus Store. It currently officially supports the Oculus Rift (with Oculus Touch) and HTC Vive VR systems. Users with the Oculus Rift have the option of running the app either using the native Oculus SDK, or through SteamVR.

Paradiddle currently officially supports the Oculus Rift (with Oculus Touch) and HTC Vive VR systems. Users with the Oculus Rift have the option of running the app either using the native Oculus SDK, or through SteamVR. While not officially tested, the app should also run with any VR headset that has SteamVR support, such as Windows Mixed Reality headsets.

Drum samples in Paradiddle are tied to different parameters such as hit velocity (how hard the drum was hit) and hit location (on a drum type such as the ride cymbal, whether it was hit near the center versus the edges), while also making use of round robins to make sure no two consecutive drum hit will sound the same. All of these result in a natural sound that make it feel like you’re playing with real drums!

First, make sure you press on your trackpad (on HTC Vive) or thumbstick (on Oculus Rift) to switch out of your drum sticks and bring up the menu. You can drag new drums into the scene by hovering over a drum and pressing your right trigger to grab it.
To rearrange an existing drum in your scene, hover over it and use your right trigger to grab it. You can scale drums by hovering over a drum with both controllers, and pressing both triggers while dragging them away from/towards each other.

To delete a drum, grab onto it using both of your controllers to start scaling it, and scale it all the way down. After a certain point, the drum will change to a red color, indicating that it will be deleted once you let go.
Alternatively, you can delete all drums in your scene by selecting ‘Clear All Drums’ from the menu.

Use the ‘Load/Save Drum Set’ menu options to load or save your set. Loading a new set will by default clear all existing drums in the scene.

Select the ‘Start Recording’ button on the Options tab to start a recording. Switch back to your drum sticks and play your piece, and when you’re done, switch back to the Options tab and select ‘Stop Recording.’ Your recording will now be saved and can be loaded up at any point.
Select the ‘Load Recording’ button to bring up a list of recording files that are saved in your Recordings directory. Selecting any of these will bring up a Recording window and automatically start playing back the recording. You can pause, loop, and change the playback rate of recordings as you see fit. You can also reposition the recording window by hovering over it with a controller, and grabbing it using that trigger.

If installed from Steam, your save files are located under …/Steam/steamapps/common/Paradiddle/Recordings for saved recordings, and …/Steam/steamapps/common/Paradiddle/DrumLayouts for saved drum sets.
Will soon be updated for Oculus.

Place your audio file (any modern audio format is supported) under the Saved/AudioFiles folder in your installation directory. For many this directory will look like: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Paradiddle\Paradiddle\Saved\AudioFiles\. The next time you launch Paradiddle, your audio files should appear in the Load Audio File tab.

There are several ways of triggering the kick drum and opening/closing the hi-hat in Paradiddle. The default settings are currently right trigger, (and with Oculus Touch, A and X) for the bass drum, and left trigger to open the hi-hat. You can always remap your controls in the Controls menu under Options if you’re not happy with the default setting.
In addition, you can use the Ctrl key for controlling the hi-hat, and the Space key for triggering the kick. Any peripheral that emulates Ctrl or Space will also work, such as USB pedals that can emulate keyboard input.
(Beta-only) You can also connect any MIDI controller, such as an electronic drum pedal that goes through a drum module, to your PC to control your kick drum. Details of how this can be achieved can be found here.

If you have pedals that can emulate keyboard input, you can set one to emulate Ctrl to control the hi-hat, and the other to emulate Space bar to control the kick drum. This control mapping can also be changed in the app.
(Beta-only) Alternatively you can use an electronic-drum pedal that goes through a MIDI interface to control the kick. Details of how this works can be found here.

If you find yourself triggering accidental or missing hits while pressing on the RB pedal, here are some things to try.  Open up your sound settings, select the microphone jack that the pedal is plugged into in the Input section, and open Device Properties. Under the Levels tab, make sure your microphone level is set to 100. You can also play with the microphone boost level if just changing the microphone levels alone don’t seem to help. If you’re having issues with too many accidental hits being triggered from pedal presses, you might want to lower the microphone or boost level.

Yes you can! Just go to the Controls menu under Options and change the mapping for whichever button you’d like to use your hi-hat to ‘Close Hi-Hat’. After you try out the button, you’ll notice that the hi-hat stays open by default, and will only close when you press the button again.

Paradiddle indeed has support for MIDI in/out, letting you use your samples and effects through your favorite digital audio workstation, or integrate MIDI devices into Paradiddle to control your drums that way. You can take a look at the MIDI update notes to see how you can set it up and what the current limitations are.

Paradiddle currently uses WASAPI as its default output mode, with the ability to switch to ASIO if wanted. You can open up the Audio tab under Options to select your output device and driver.

Paradiddle is fully integrated with LIV, which allows various calibration and compositing tools to make the mixed reality recording process as painless as possible. If you run into any issues while getting LIV to work with Paradiddle, feel free to post on the #streaming_and_recording channel on the Paradiddle Discord, or check out the LIV Discord for more information.

Paradiddle was made using Unreal Engine 4 and FMOD Studio for the audio system.