Fortnite Festival adds Pro Drums and Mic Vocals to Main Stage mode

Fortnite Festival gave drummers with electronic kits a more serious lane into Main Stage, adding Pro Drums alongside Mic Vocals and turning the mode into something much closer to a full band setup. The new features went live April 16 as part of Season 14, which is headlined by Laufey and also brought new outfits, Jam Tracks, and other performance options into the rotation.

For players who already own an e-kit or other MIDI drum hardware, the practical change is immediate. Epic’s support docs now list a Festival (Pro Drums) section inside MIDI Controller settings, and the company says cymbals have to be enabled in the Game tab to allow cymbal authoring during play. That matters because it moves Fortnite Festival beyond basic pad-hitting and into a lane where rack toms, kicks, and cymbal placement can be mapped more like a real kit, giving players more room to practice coordination and limb independence instead of just chasing lane patterns.

That shift narrows, at least in part, the gap between game drumming and actual kit skills. Fortnite Festival Main Stage already supported Lead, Bass, Drums, Vocals, Pro Lead, and Pro Bass, but Pro Drums had not been broadly available in the same way as Epic’s newer pro-guitar paths. Epic expanded Pro Lead and Pro Bass to any console platform or PC in May 2024, even without a supported guitar controller, and Pro Drums now follows that broader philosophy of letting more players access advanced parts without needing a narrow hardware setup.

Mic Vocals adds a similar change for singers who want to treat Main Stage like a real performance space, not just a button-mash mode. Epic says PC and console players can sing into compatible Fortnite microphones, though it also warns that some headset microphones are not being detected. The current workaround is to use a controller’s built-in mic or a mic connected through the controller’s aux port. There is one hard local-multiplayer limit: only Player 1 can choose Mic Vocals in a local session.

Community response was instant. Drummer creator ChadJustDrums has already been live-streaming the return and posting multiple Pro Drums clips and full combo runs on YouTube and Twitch, including “Down With the Sickness,” “Dragula,” “Applause,” and “Breed.” That kind of rapid testing is usually the clearest sign that a feature has landed in the right place: not just as a novelty, but as a new competitive target for players who have spent years waiting for a more serious rhythm-game drum experience on console.