Me and my roommates play Rock Band together. A lot. We don't always have a signer, but 3 of us play together consistently on expert. So, it's always a tough time when some of the equipment fails--and it does fail when playing on expert. This past month has been a rough month for our drum set, but it's now better than ever thanks to EA's warranty and a little bit of creative modding on the part of me and my roommate.
At the end of January, my roommate came in and told me that the drums were broken. Really broken. I went to take a look and found that we had 3 cracked drum pads, one of which had the drumstick completely blow THROUGH the pad. We'd all drummed hard on the pads, but we had to in order to get the strikes to register. So, I got an RMA and they 2 day aired a new set to me.
When that set showed up, we found that there have been some major improvements since our original set was constructed. The drum pads are now thicker (probably due to people cracking them like we did). They're now sensitive enough to pick up light tapping, which makes drumming a lot quieter and easier.
The new set did wonders for our drumming.... and then last week our drum pedal snapped.
I had heard of various people modding their drum pedals, and figured that since ours was broken we may as well give it a try before RMAing. One involved replacing/reinforcing the plastic pedal plate with metal. Apparently it's actually a business! While an interesting concept, I figured that was kind of a waste of money when I could just send back for a new one. Then I found a method for transforming a real drum pedal into a rock band pedal. Me and my roommate agreed that we definitely needed to try that. Headed out to the stores and managed to find a used double pedal at Guitar Center for $60 (a steal considering that new double pedals retail for well over 100 dollars).
As you can see in the above picture, the beaters have been adjusted to swing down to hit a horizontal surface, instead of how they would strike a conventional drum. I was going to show how we did that, but my roommate was a little overzealous and disassembled everything before I got to take a picture. Conventional drums allow the pedal to attach to the structure, but sadly the rock band drums are not designed in such a manner. This is a problem because the pedal needs to be kept stationary. After an hour or trying to get the pedals and drum set attached to plywood, we changed strategies and bought a rug for the living room (we needed one anyway) and used the velcro under the left pedal to keep it in place. I managed to hold the right pedal in place by assembling the drum set through the pedal itself. Works like a charm.
The original real pedal mod clued me into the fact that there is a small magnet underneath the pedal that triggers a switch in the base. He went through the process of removing the magnet and embedding it in an old beater, but had some difficulty getting it aligned with the reader. We opted to use two larger magnets (one for each beater of the double pedal) and tape them with electrical tape to the beaters.
We found that the large magnets combined with placing the base sideways allowed the twin beaters to each trigger the magnetic switch. The only caveat, is that because it is triggered by the magnet, you can't rest your foot on one pedal while striking with the other. It's a minor inconvenience which we're hoping to fix in the future by replacing the magnet circuit with a custom built vibration sensing circuit. (Just waiting on involvement from one of our electrical engineering friends) I then mounted a sponge to the top of the base with double sided tape and rubber bands. This quiets the strikes and prevents the beaters from cracking the base.
The result is a very clean looking mod that makes drumming awesome! The new pedal setup definitely is more accurate and easier to hit than the original was. I'll be playing Rock Band like this from now on!
