A Question About The Rock Band Instruments, Everyone Please Read!

[BillLauren]

Alright, I have been coming to these forums for a while now, and I have read numerous posts of how individuals have had their instruments not work right out of the box, to them breaking down over time.

I was lucky enough to find a Rock Band last November when it was released, and I have never had any problems with any of my instruments, and I do play daily. The Drums work fine and read every note, even fast ones, haven't had a problem with the Pedal either. The Guitar Strum bar works fine too and the same goes for the Microphone. Has anyone else been this fortunate?

I will be honest, the following is my difficulty range per instrument:

Vocals - Easy, Medium, Hard and Expert
Guitar - Easy, Medium, Hard
Bass - Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert
Drums - Easy, Medium

People that know me say I am very cautious with my instruments though. I don't pound on the Drums and I play the Guitar and Bass lightly but with Vocals I am usually belting out the lyrics. Is how rough you are with your instruments or what difficulty you play on, or even how much you play a huge factor? My cousin is pretty rough with his instruments, but his are in working condition also.

I'm not trying to offend anyone who has had to get their instruments replaced with this post, I've just been wondering about this.

[whypick1]

I've been through one guitar and one drumset.

Guitar lasted maybe a month. Would've been longer but most of that time I was solely using my Xplorer until that broke. Even though the strummer wouldn't register downstrums, and I only downstrum, it wasn't abuse that killed it, considering it only survived about two weeks of play. Doubt the fact that this was all on expert had anything to do with it.

Drumset lasted about 3 months. Played through all of the medium tour and got to RttH on hard (where I still am *sigh*). Yellow pad dented, which was causing extra hits to register. That one I'd consider abuse on my part. I was (and still am) using fairly poor technique, at least by my own standards (plus, banging the hell out of them during some songs is required for maximum fun), but my current set I've put mousepads on. If I could convince them to maybe stay on for more than a week, things would be dandy. Last time I had the red one come about 5 hits into the first drum roll in TKaR. That was not fun.

Bass pedal also broke around the same time as the guitar. Pedal Metal took care of that one. If I break it now, I'm seriously worried about what I've been drinking.

[AnarchyintheUK]

I'm still on my originals of everything. Drums are fine although they aren't played that much. Vocals really fine nothing wrong. Guitar I broke my whammy bar about 3 months ago, but recently put it back together using an elastic band and it works fine.

When Rock Band comes out for PS3 in Europe I may try to send back my guitar but apart from that everything is fine.

[Magnet]

I don't normally play on vocals, but from what I can tell the mic is perfectly functional. Hardware complaints about the mic are pretty rare from what I've seen over the last several months.

I play Expert drums, and about a month ago my red pad cracked. At first, it just seemed like the pad was split open a little bit. But after further investigation, it was completely cracked underneath. Oddly enough, it was still functioning perfectly, but the pad opened up more and more over time until I decided to RMA. I don't know the cause of the cracking exactly. I don't really pound on my drums, but I've had them since November, and I'm not the only one who uses them. So it's probably down to normal wear-and-tear in addition to others using it more harshly than I do.

My new drum set seems to be working fine, although I suspect my yellow pad may not always be registering hits. When I do rolls on my yellow pad to test this theory out, it always works perfectly. But in simple patterns in songs, I'll miss a yellow for no apparent reason. I'm unable to determine if it's just my timing being slightly off or the pad not responding to the hit for whatever reason. Mystery currently unsolved.

My bass pedal broke once - when I was doing well on Cherub Rock on Expert. This was back in December. Since then, no problems with the bass pedal.

As for the guitar, well that's a bit more interesting. I play Expert on that too. My first guitar lasted maybe a month. Then the strumming got all weird. I looked up online about this and read about the magnetic strips that get out of alignment (in first gen guitars - they probably don't make anymore of these now). So I re-aligned them, and it worked great for another week or so. Then I needed to re-align them once more after it got messed up again. I have to chalk this up mostly to playing on Expert with some fast strumming songs. For someone who plays on Hard or lower, breaking the strumming on a 1st gen guitar will probably take longer to do, but I'd bet on it breaking sooner or later.

I stopped playing guitar for a while after it got misaligned once more. I heard about the third-party guitars coming out (I'm a PS3 owner who was pretty devastated and unhappy to hear about the Les Paul patch being indefinitely held back by Sony), and thought I might wait for those to arrive. But when the Boston pack came out, I just had to play guitar on those songs. No more waiting would be permitted.

So, being courageous and slightly bored at the time, I consulted a guitar mod topic on ScoreHero for taking a Gibson SG strummer and putting it into an Strat. After gutting the Strat's strumming mechanism and soldering the Gibson controller's strum mechanism in its place, I had the perfect Strat for me. It's worked flawlessly so far, and I love playing the guitar again. For most people, that amount of work is completely uncalled for just to have working peripheral, but I actually had an interesting experience doing the hardware modification and I couldn't be happier with my Strat now. (Note that doing the work that I have described here will void the warranty on the guitar. I'm not endorsing this as a fix, merely describing what I did.)

I've always felt that the software was exceptional for this game, and that the hardware was its weakest point (though still exceptional from a design point of view). I'm hoping that they can continue to improve their hardware over time and work with third-party manufacturers to provide even more peripherals to work in the game. The RMA setup for this game has been very convenient though, for all the problems people have encountered with the hardware.

[Incision]

the only thing i've had to replace is my drums, mostly because that's all i'm ever using. i've been playing them on expert since the game came out, and i play pretty often, and i honestly think the way i play is what makes them go bad. when i'm playing on expert, and there's a bunch of rolls, i can't just tap on the drums, i have to give it a pretty decent hit. i don't hit it as hard as i can, but i can't tap it as lightly as if i were playing on easy/medium.

[litaljohn]

Is how rough you are with your instruments or what difficulty you play on, or even how much you play a huge factor? My cousin is pretty rough with his instruments, but his are in working condition also.



i'm going to say that at a certain point of course how you handle the things will effect the longevity but I have had no issues with anything and I've been frustrated to the point of just punching the guitar and it still works fine. (there was a time I missed a gold star by only one point :o ) so at least as far as I go as a statistic, put one up for treatment of the instruments not being a cause. Im sure some people take great care of the instruments have have it break on them too so it looks more like a mixed bag.