Go to practice mode and find any song with a long intro that doesn’t include drums. I choose “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by The Who and set the speed to 50%. This allows me to free drum for a long period of time, and you can hear the drums as you hit them. This also allows you to guage exactly how delayed the sound really is, but that’s for another topic.
Now try fast rolls on every drum pad. Many people will report at least one pad, usually the red one, being unresponsive to the fast drum rolls/hits. Mine was only picking up every 4-5th hit so any song I played with a fast roll (tons of songs on expert) was losing scores and note streaks.
Possible fix with a US penny:
Possible fix by taping to reduce rebound effects on the piezo sensors (expand the “about this video” section to find the quoted text). Watch video to see how tape works, basically you’re just tightening up the gap between the drum head and the body of the drum.
The tape is on my drums because the drums were faulty out of the box; the tape holds the pad closer to the sensor inside of it, which allows for more sensitive hits for the time being, until I get it replaced.
If one of the drum heads stops working, some people have luck messing with the piezo sensors themselves, which may have faulty/loose wiring. But this isn’t a red/green drum roll issue, it’s a “my drums are frickin’ broken” issue:
There was an outstanding thread on the Rock Band forums showing actual voltage graphs for the piezo sensors, and explaining how rebound might affect that, but I can’t find it for the life of me.
Here’s a pic of the extra drum height-- taping this down improves sensitivity.
For now, though, you could use some duct tape-just hold down that green pad with your hands, one side at a time, press the pad in about halfway, then tape it into position. Then the opposite side, then the other two sides. Kind of like changing a tire, just make sure that the pad isn’t pressed all the way down and that it has even spacing on all sides, you should be able to play fine until your box arrives to return it.
Apologies if I’ve asked this before and am forgetting myself, but has anybody tried playing the RB drums with drum brushes? You can probably find a set for around fifteen bucks at any music store worth walking into.
You wouldn’t be able to do fast rolls while improvising (brushes don’t bounce off a head the way a solid stick does), but I’d imagine they’d cut significantly down on the wear-and-tear/“pounding the shit out of these things” factor while simultaneously reducing the acoustic noise from bashing the drum heads.
After spelunking the ScoreHero / Rock Band forums for a while, it seems that the standard “fix” for sketchy drums is basically still taping them. The penny mod is essentially a sensitivity boost, whereas taping assists with damping and reduces sensitivity.
The ghetto “socks n’ rubber bands” mod seems to balance these two poles: damping plus sensitivity.
It seems that the sock mod can work with the EL set too, although in a different fashion.
I cut some socks into small portions, rolled them up, and put them between each foam pad in the interior of each drum (4 in each drum). This causes a significant improvement in the response of the drums.
The trick is to make the sock rolls slightly higher than the foam segments, because the socks have superior dampening over the cheap foam. The end result, as far as I can tell, is that the shock wave from hitting the pad is stopped quickly, allowing the piezo sensors to pick up fast rolls without dropping notes as frequently.
The unmodded drums dropped about 1 in 10 notes. This is reduced to about 1 in 100 notes dropped with the sock mod.
