The Music Room is a collection of instruments that you play in virtual reality. Unlike keyboard MIDI controllers, The Music Room allows you to strum, slide, bend and drum naturally and expressively. With 8 dimensions of expressive control per note The Music Room is the most expressive MIDI controller available and supports the future of MIDI, MPE. Play carefully scanned drums and cymbals from Pearl, Ludwig, Sabian, Zildjian, DW and Gretsch. Play drums, laser harp and our unique chord harp. All these are integrated with the bundled copy of Bitwig 8-Track, the leading expressive audio workstation. Easily loop and record instruments from VR, select presets and launch clips.
The instruments are designed with playability in mind, unlike traditional complex electronic instruments, or acoustic instrument that are constrained by physics.
The Music Room comes with an amazing collection of samples, effects and synths included in Bitwig. With MPE The Music Room can control pitch, volume (aftertouch), timbre, note on and off velocity and 3 more dimensions continuously per note. This gives you amazing creative freedom with your music.
Instead of finger drumming with pads, play a drum kit that looks like a drum kit. Everything is visually distinct, so no more identical pads or remembering if blue is your bass drum. Expressive instrument control means that parts you could previously only do with automation can now be performed live. No longer are you constrained by mapping instruments to a keyboard. Drum kits from Pearl, Ludwig, DW and Gretsch and cymbals for Sabian and Zildjian have been carefully scanned and included.
The space you are in shapes your music. Get comfortable being on stage, in the studio and in a practice room. Play at Cherry Bar, the best rock and roll bar in the world and Bakehouse Studio, a favourite rehearsal room of Elvis Costello, Tool and Nick Cave.
The instruments in The Music Room encourage you to explore different ways of songwriting, that aren’t usually possible with electronic instruments. Strum chords or slide from note to note. Change drums kits on the fly with clear visual feedback.
The Music Room is a MIDI controller and can control any DAW. The bundled sampler is VST plugin. If you don’t already have a host, The Music Room ships with Bitwig 8-Track. It’s designed to be low latency and high performance, for stage and studio use. In the future you'll be able to run the visual part of The Music Room on a separate machine from the audio host, if for example you want to have a Windows computer doing the VR portion but have a Macbook running your synths.
We support MIDI triggers for the kick or we have an audio to midi trigger VST plugin. With it you can use any stomp box or microphone as a kick pedal. This video explains the options.
When used with a fully featured drum synth such as BFD3 the drums support positional sensing on the snare, 3 zones on each cymbal, variable hi-hat control and a full range of articulations. You can play cross stick hits, rim shots, tip and shank hits on the hi-hat, choke cymbals and it's all velocity sensitive. If there is an articulation we're missing please contact us and we'll add it. We're planning to add support for changing stick types to brushes and mallets but this isn't implemented yet.
The included sampler is a VST, but you can load our samples in any SFZ player. We've tested with Sforzando which is available in AAX and AU format. We're planning to make our midi trigger plugin available in as many formats as possible.
You need a VR headset to use The Music Room. At launch The Music Room will support the HTC Vive running on Windows. As soon as HTC supports Mac and Linux we will release Mac and Linux version of The Music Room. We will be support the Oculus Rift with Touch when the Touch launches and PlayStation VR when it launches.
The audio side of The Music Room can run on a different computer, and we eventually plan to have Mac and Linux versions of the hub application as well. The bundled copy of Bitwig 8-Track is available on Mac, Windows and Linux.
Anything that accepts MIDI can be controlled. An MPE capable host is recommended and we test primarily with Bitwig Studio.
The Music Room is bundled with and connects to Bitwig 8-Track and Studio which which is the premier application for MPE support, looping and sequencing.
There is a good list at Roger Linn Design. We mostly test with Strobe 2 from FXpansion and Bitwig Studio.