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.
If you have the PS3 version of Rock Band, then here's how to mod your drum kit:
Step 1: Plug drum kit into PC.
Done. Your PC will detect the PS3 drum kit as a MIDI device.
Check out this link for details for the Xbox-360 version:
http://news.filefront.com/rock-band-drums-for-pc-xbox-360-vs-ps3-kit/
The crazy kids over at the rockband.scorehero.com forums have been modding the drum controller since like a week after the game came out: http://rockband.scorehero.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=1038&sid=d1748155f6f141a8f805db1bf5df84b3
Double bass pedals, yamaha midi kit mods, alternative bass pedals, analyzing how the piezos in the drum kid actually register hits and improving on them... List goes on.
I've modded my pedal after the cheap one that came with the kit inevitably broke after the third day of playing. Since the bass pedal connects to the rest of the kit using a mono audio plug, it's easy for someone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of electronics (me) to rig a real bass pedal to work with the kit. Documented here: http://rockband.scorehero.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2029