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It is here! After 5 years of Early Access, we're so excited to finally release Paradiddle V1 out into the world. A huge, huge thank you to everyone who has supported us during our early access years, gave us feedback and reported bugs patiently as we continually fixed and improved the app. Paradiddle would be nowhere near where it is now without all of your help.
Along with Steam, we launched V1 on
Quest App Lab. If you have or know someone with a Quest, tell them to check us out!
Version 1 is a big milestone in our complete vision of Paradiddle as a music sandbox, learning tool and rhythm game all bundled in one. It's content packed with 50+ velocity-sensitive freely playable instruments, 16, songs, 10 lessons, MIDI + pedal support and a whole new look. It's also a first step in our move into mixed reality with Passthrough support on Quest (App Lab version only).
This is a massive update, so let's take a look at what's new and changed:
Overhauled UI and UX
- We've redesigned the whole UI so that all of the options and features packed into the app have more sensible places in our various menus.
- Placed a new toolbar under the menu for some options you might want to access quickly, such as recentering, or the camera tool.
- Switched to a laser pointer based interaction mechanism to make it easier when placing/grabbing content at a distance such as the note highway or various app windows.
- Other improvements include some fun new UI sounds, as well as a rounder, more polished look overall for all our UI elements.
New Environments
We have 3 new intricate environments built in collaboration with Studio Syro:
- Dojo: The perfect place to unwind and play some lo-fi hop hop beats as you watch the birds flying through the swaying trees. Comes with a sleepy animal companion who'll listen to your music.
- Jazz Club: Step into our moody jazz club and perform on stage for a small and intimate audience.
- Galaxy: Transport yourself to a planet once inhabited by an ancient alien civilization, where music affects the land itself.
New Instruments & Improved Default Drums
- You'll notice that your Drums tab has some new additions! We now have 5 full drum kits (including a jazz kit with brushes), mallet instruments like the xylophone, marimba and glockenspiel, and auxiliary percussion such as bongos, tambourines and timpanis. The default kit has also been updated to use some of the new drums, you should notice a difference especially with the hi-hat and snare.
- Favorites Tab: We've added a favorites tab at the top to organize any instruments you might want to have quick access to. You can click the heart icon in any given drum's options menu to add them to your favorites.
Note Highway Improvements with 16 Total Songs
- TImeline controls: Go to any point in the song and easily practice a section you might be stuck on.
- Metronome toggle:Turn on a metronome to get some help while trying to nail down the timing of a song.
- Playthrough stats: At the end of a song, you'll now see a breakdown of your performance which shows how many notes you missed, or played early/late/perfect.
- Highway Tilting: While grabbing the highway, you can now use your left controller thumbstick to tilt the highway up/down.
- Load only required drums setting: Added a new toggle under Options -> General to have the song system only load the kits that are required by the song being played. For instance, if you load an Easy difficulty song that only uses 3 different drums, it won't load the rest of the kit drums for you.
- Fire mode: You'll notice the fire mode kick in when you're on a combo streak, lighting everything on the highway on fire.
With V1, we're also excited to finally release our full song lineup, which includes
10 original songs + 6 indie songs! You can check out our
OST album VirtualCore on Spotify, or see the full list of 16 songs on this
Paradiddle Soundtrack playlist.
Brand New Lesson System with 10 Lessons
In order to make Paradiddle as user-friendly and accessible as possible, V1 introduces an initial lineup of 10 drumming lessons. The lessons will teach you some of the fundamental concepts of drumming, while letting you practice certain beats and variations in a pressure-free environment.
An example: In the Rock Beat lesson, you'll first learn how to place your snare and hi-hat, and then practice the individual parts of the beat before bringing it together. A lot of the lessons are based on this idea of progressive repetition, where each repetition gets a bit more complex. So a typical lesson teaching a pattern might look like:
- Play the beat with the notes waiting for you until you hit them.
- Play the same beat, in a slow, steady tempo.
- Play the beat in the regular, steady tempo.
We already have some big improvements planned for the lesson system, but we'd also love to hear your feedback in the process. Let us know if you've found the lessons useful, what you liked/disliked and what improvements you'd like to see. We're listening!
Cross Platform Leaderboards
Our built-in songs are now all connected to cross-platform leaderboards that you can view using the trophy icon in the song details tab. If you're in our
Discord, you can also check out our leaderboards channel that posts whenever some ranks in the top 10 of any song difficulty, and show off to everyone in the server!
Drum Anchor for Kit Repositioning
- You'll now see a Drum Anchor button under your kit which lets you reposition your whole kit without grabbing them one by one. It's hard to miss - it's the circular button with arrows on it under the kit.
- While grabbing the anchor, you can use your thumbstick up/down buttons to adjust your kit height. This had been a widely requested feature and rightly so - it's now much, much easier to quickly readjust your kit.
Improved Stick Mechanics and Options
- We've reworked much of the stick interaction mechanics to make the drumming experience more responsive and robust, and prevent issues such as double hits.
- Added a widely requested hit-through prevention feature, which prevents you from accidentally triggering a drum that was under the first one you hit. Hit-through prevention is enabled by default, and you can turn it off in the Sticks tab under Options.
- Added a hitbox size slider for adjusting how much of the stick can interact with the drums.
PDF Import
You can now import PDFs into the app to open up uses such as loading in sheet music. The PDF window can be repositioned to your liking, and we're planning on adding a resize functionality in the future as well.
Other Quality of Life Improvements
- We've switched over to a new folder for custom songs, saved kits/recordings, audio files and PDFs: Documents/Paradiddle/. For instance, custom songs should now go under Documents/Paradiddle/Songs. The directory will be automatically created for you when you first run V1, so no need to make it yourself. This was done for ease of use (the path is easier to remember and mention), as well as to prevent issues with accidentally deleting saved content while uninstalling and reinstalling the app.
- Show tutorial on start toggle:Added a toggle under Options -> General to control whether the tutorial should start automatically when the app launches.
- 3rd Custom Key Binding: Added a 3rd keyboard key binding in addition to Space and Ctrl, with the default being set to Enter. It's not mapped to an in-app action by default. This was added to give some more flexibility to users who are playing with a triple pedal setup.
- Camera tool rotation: Added a way to have the third person camera rotating at a speed set by the user.
Green Screen
Under Options -> Graphics, you can now enable a green screen mode that'll turn off any visuals other than your drums, the UI and the note highway. We're excited to see the cool and wacky videos everyone will make with this feature!
Passthrough (on Quest App Lab only)
Similar to the green screen mode, Passthrough AR on Quest allows you to turn off any environments in Paradiddle to instead show your physical surroundings. You can finally get some musician friends in the same room as you and accompany them better in a jam session. We have a lot more enhanced AR features planned in the future, so stay tuned!
ParEdit - A custom song editor made for Paradiddle
- One of our community members, [CANA]Dan, has created a fantastic program for Paradiddle custom song mappers who might want to make a custom song from scratch or edit one. You can grab the latest version here: https://github.com/CANA-Dan/ParEdit/releases/latest, and ping him on our Discord for any questions you might have. ParEdit shows the notes on the same highway layout as the app. You can also to the song at the same time while working on the map, and see an audio spectrogram to better lay out your notes.
- This is a great option over our existing PD Song Creator tool for those who might not have a pre-existing midi file to work with, or have any experience working in DAW/midi software to make customs.
Known issues:
We're currently investigating or have internally already fixed some of these issues, and will have a patch up as soon as possible to address them. Thanks for reporting them to us over the past few days!
- By switching to the new Documents/Paradiddle folder, we broke backwards compatibility with the old custom songs folder. We recommend people to use the new Documents path, but our first patch will also add support back to the Saved/Songs path on PC so your custom songs don't suddenly disappear.
- Lesson 4 gets stuck in one of the steps - the OK button won't proceed.
- PDF loader crashes on standalone Quest (App Lab) version.
- The custom song achievement triggers in other scenarios where the note highway opens, such as lessons.
- Spectator window flickers on high refresh rate displays - a current workaround is to turn on either the smooth first person or third person cameras in the Camera tool. With one of the camera tool cameras enabled, the flickering will go away.
- The song ending menu says "Song Name - Easy" regardless of difficulty.
Coming Soon:
- Scoring improvements (accuracy and fire mode based scoring changes) and additional highway visual polish. Get ready for those leaderboards to get shaken up!
- Tutorial videos on our YouTube explaining various app features such as making custom songs, MIDI integration, low latency audio with ASIO.
- Lesson improvements: Multiple clickable mini exercises built into one lesson.
- MIDI support on Quest.
Roadmap Post V1
V1 was a big milestone for us, but we're by no means done with improving Paradiddle and adding more content. We're planning to share a more detailed look at our future roadmap over the upcoming weeks.
Help us get to the Quest Store!
If you have a Quest and would like to see Paradiddle approved to the official store, the best thing you can do is to buy the V1 release on
App Lab and leave a rating/review. With V1 coming out, we think the app deserves its place on the official store, and you can help us get there.
Once again, thanks from the whole team for supporting us and joining us on this journey over the past 5 years,
- Emre, Tristan & Cem
[email protected]
Join us on Discord!: https://discord.gg/paradiddle
Twitter: @ParadidleVR
Paradiddle drum covers Youtube playlist (your cover could be on here too!)
Official Paradiddle website: http://paradiddleapp.com
FAQ: http://paradiddleapp.com/faq
You can now play any song by following drum notation instead of seeing the highway! You can activate the notation view from the song settings, in the Highway Layout section.
The system includes options such as separating hand and feet hits, or separating drum and cymbal hits. You can have the note colors match your drum colors to enhance readability or disable it for more realism.
Since we don’t have the actual sheet music for any given song, the system does its best to figure out what the notation representation should look like. If you have any suggestions on improvements or can point us to examples in songs where a given section doesn’t seem to make sense, that’d be a huge help for us in improving this system.
