Rock Band Uber Mod!

After completing my pedal mod I kept reading about what other improvements could be made.  I ended up deciding that a full blown electronic drum kit was required.  After much deliberation I talked myself into dropping $700 on a Yamaha DTXplorer.  Thanks to Flash for distilling 100+ pages of a forum thread into this site I was able to complete the mod. 

Instead of soldering to the almost invisible points on the back of the RB circuit board I soldered directly to the button pads.  Being careful to keep the wires as far to the outside and a flat as possible kept the buttons working like usual.  I also used the USB power to run the MSA to avoid having another power brick.

I think the controller box turned out pretty well.  Playing on the real drum pads made a huge difference in response.  The base pedal being piezo instead of a reed relay makes it require much less movement to trigger.  I have been trying to play the songs using the proper cymbals and toms with required me to go back to medium difficulty for a couple of days.  I am back to doing mostly hard now with a couple of songs completed on expert.  Overall it has been a very cool experience.  It is my first major hack and now that it is done I have to find something else to hack!

 

UPDATE - 5/22/05

Now that it has been a few week my skills are to back to where they were from before the hack.  Playing on a real set is so much better.  I really like that I have the ability to use the right pad for the right sound.  I saw that Guitar Hero is going to have cymbals and I think Rock Band should have done that to start with.  I wish I could say I was rocking on expert all the time but I just cant get my kick speed up.  I might just have to add a double bass pedal.

I finally decided to open the box and post pictures.

I bought the MSA disassembled.  That was a lot of soldering!

I could not get the wire to stick to the points that Flash listed on his site so I decided to use the buttons.  The buttons still work and I can use the drum pads for navigation.

I used the usb power to run the MSA.  The red is positive and the black is ground.

I dremeled the original Rock Band drum controller down and then epoxied into the project box.

Comments

[Jahara]

You are awesome. Too cool.

[Tufty McTavish]

I've just done much the same with a Roland TD3. I like what you've done with the box that houses the MSA-P. At the moment my RB controller is external to my MSA-P enclosure but I think I may try to do something similar as I'm using a large enough box.

[Moriah]

Building the controller into the box was pretty simple. It certainly cleaned up the look of the mod. If you have the box and a dremel I highly recommend doing it.

[Becky]

Is your set still functional in its original intended capacity? Because people have used Yamaha DTX kits to play another drum game on the PS2-- it's called Drummania, and it is a Japanese music sim game by Konami. It has been around for much longer than Rock Band, and if you're looking to up the difficulty, I think you would enjoy it a lot. :)

[soltrain]

You should really check out dtxmania - it's drummania for your computer, you can hook up your set via USB and play hundreds of downloadable songs -