Rock Band Drum Kit Modded

Brett "Buzz" Dawson writes "Seeing all of the Guitar Hero guitar mods I thought it would be an interesting change of pace to mod a full-sized drum kit for use as a Rock Band game controller. With everything that I build I take lots of pictures to document the build process so here is the full build of my drum kit." Fortunately at my house Kathleen has been doing the drumming, so I don't think I need to go to these extremes to handle the abuse. I'm more interested in mods that let you use the original drums as a real instrument like the guitar mods that are floating out there. The tiny bits of drum solo time in Rock Band don't satisfy my internal Keith Moon.

Ambient music created with Rock Band drums.

[mpathetiq]

In response to the editor comment: I hooked up my drum controller to my MacBook and used GamePad Companion to feed keystrokes into Ableton Live. I was able to use it as a real drum kit for a bit but I'm not a drummer, so instead I started using pitched tones for each of the pads.... much more interesting!

I posted the results on my blog. [blogspot.com]

Re:A friend got Rockband

[kellyb9]

Actually - as someone who plays guitar - I can't fully agree with your comment. Although, in part, being good at Rockband is not going to make you a better guitarist, I believe it does help beginners move their fingers independently. Which is one of the early battles people face when trying to learn how to play guitar correctly.

I can't really say the same thing for drums or singing. On a side note, has anyone actually used the microphone yet, and is it really lame?

My tips for modding

[slagheap]

My only mod so far is to replace the bass drum pedal. I'm a "real" drummer (though I don't play much)... and I couldn't stand the included drum pedal. It has a huge springy travel, and it triggers somewhere in the middle of that travel (rather than right at the end like a real pedal would).

I have a Yamaha DTXPress electronic drum kit, and was able to use a cymbal pad from that, mounted (on a cymbal stand) right in front of the DTX's bass drum trigger. The bass drum trigger itself doesn't work for some reason, but it does have a nice mount point for the real bass pedal. I had to remove one of the crossbars at the bottom of the Rock Band kit so that I could have all the stuff under the kit where it should be -- the remaining crossbar passes between the pedal and the vertical part of the bass trigger, right on top of the clamp.

To actually connect it, all I needed was a 1/4" female --> to 1/8" male mono adapter (which I already had for playing guitar into the computer).

The Rock Band drum kit seems a little flakey when first hooking up another trigger. I even thought I had broken it because for a while, the included pedal didn't work. I was able to fix it by repeatedly unplugging and plugging it into the port on the main drumkit.

Important tip for testing the triggers... go to the song list in quick play. It lets you change the sorting of the list by hitting the bass drum.

Slagheap

Re:A friend got Rockband

[wed128]

I am sick and tired of you damn liberals turning every topic into a George W Bush Bash-a-thon. For god's sake, can we have ONE article where we just leave the politics out of it? His term is almost over...quit bitching and vote in November.