Hey out there in internet land. This year has been crazy for all of us. It's been filled with pain and loss across the spectrum of human experience. I don't think anyone has been spared from at least some level of mental distress this year, so we want to take a moment to try and give a little back to help some of us who are in need.

On Saturday, October 17th (tomorrow as of this posting) we'll be running a charity livestream from 12PM-8PM EST in support of the National Eating Disorders Association. We will always support anyone living with any mental health disorder, but in these trying times more people than ever are struggling with some sort of mental health issue.

If you want to just hang out and be silly with us, We'll be drawing stuff, playing Rock Band (with Real Drums!) and doing a few other fun things throughout the day. If you're feeling charitable, or just need to chill with some well meaning nerds, check out the campaign, and we'll see you tomorrow!

With parts one, two and three, we have built drum pads and a kick pedal, and we now need a way to attach all of this new gear to Rock Band. If you do not have an Ion Drum Rocker drum brain and a Wired Legacy Adapter (for Xbox users), we will need to build our own solution. By modifying an existing standard Rock Band drum kit, we can create a new drum brain of our own, and use that to connect all of our new hardware to our Rock Band version of choice.

Warning: This Will Destroy Your Existing Rock Band Drums

By undertaking this mod, we will essentially be completely deconstructing a stock RB kit, and thus rendering it completely unusable for normal play. If you have the means, I might suggest acquiring a second kit (either on eBay or Craigslist, or potentially from a friend or family member with a lapsed interest in Rock Band), and modifying this second kit, leaving your current primary kit intact for potential future use if needed. Whatever kit you choose to use, make sure that it is compatible with whatever version of the game you are playing before you being this project. Finally, even if you have an existing kit that might be "broken", particularly with unresponsive or non-functional pads, there is a chance that you might be able to reclaim a kit in this state for our purposes here, so if you have a potentially damaged kit on hand, this might be a good way to get some additional use out of it.

1: Remove The Drum Heads

To begin, you will need to remove each of the drum heads from the main stock drum body. These heads are held on two ways. The first is with 4 rubber stoppers that run through the drum body, and hold the drum in place. If you look at the back of your drum body under each pad you should be able to see these. The second is with a small wire that attaches the sensor that is contained within these heads to the drum brain that is built into the drum body. To remove these heads, our goal is to pull at each of the heads with enough force to yank each of these rubber stoppers through the body, while taking care to not tear off the wire attaching the sensor to the pad (which we will sever in a more controlled manner once the pad is free of the drum body).

To remove each head, take any long, thin, rigid object you might have on hand (my go-to's are either some kind of screwdriver, or possibly a spare drumstick). Pull the edge of one of the pads up, and line up your rigid object to be close to one of the rubber stoppers holding the pad in place. slowly but forcefully, pull your rigid object up toward the top of the pad until one or more of the rubber stoppers pops up through the back of the drum body. Do not be alarmed if this takes some significant force. Do your best to apply pressure gradually and consistently, and if you take your time, you should be able to remove all of the stoppers without pulling the wires free from the drum body as well.

Once you have removed the drum head stoppers from the body, the head will still be attached by the wire assembly that is attached to the brain. Simply take some wire cutters and snip the wires where they attach to the sensor on the underside of the drum head. We will use these wires running from the brain attached to the body later. Repeat these steps for each drum head, and you should now have 4 sets of wires leading from the drum brain in the body, ready to use to attach our own gear.

2. Attach Audio Jacks To The Drum Body

Now that we have access to these wires, we will attach them to a 4 1/4'' audio jacks, and use those to attach our custom drums to this kit (to attach our custom kick pedal, you can simply get a 1/4'' to 1/8''audio adapter, and attach our pedal to the existing kick pedal jack).

When attaching our audio jacks to the drum body, I would suggest drilling some 1'' holes around the top rim of the "Blue" and "Yellow" pad sections of the drum body, and simply threading our audio jacks into these holes. Depending on what version of the stock drums you are working with, the open space inside the kit may vary, so you may need to unscrew and remove some pieces of the internal drum body, or simply take a small hand saw an pliers, and remove various pieces of the internal plastic drum assembly around the top rim area of the kit to make room for these audio jacks. Once you have made space and drilled out your holes, Attach some small lengths of wire to your audio jacks, and run these jacks through said holes and screw them down. Take the wires attached to your audio jack, and solder them to one of the sets of wires coming off of the drum brain. This establishes the connection for our drums to be attached to this brain using standard 1/4'' audio cables. Repeat this 4 times, and you should have 4 audio jacks wired up and attached to the body of your existing Rock Band drum kit.

With all of this attached and wired up, test all of your connections, and then plug your custom drums in and test the whole system together. Troubleshoot as needed, and when you have everything working, you can re-attach the drum heads to the drum body by pushing the rubber stoppers back through their holes, effectively covering up your audio jacks and custom wiring (make sure you have all of your custom wires tucked out of the way when you do this). You should now have a completely functional custom Rock Band drum kit!

That's All Folks!

That should do it for this custom drum tutorial series. If you have any additional questions or would just like to say hey, feel free to PM me here on the site, or hit me up on twitter. I'll do my best to address any inquiries as they come in, and I'd love to see pictures of your own setups if any of you end up completing some or all of this project. These drums are a ton of fun to use, and the sense of pride you'll have each time you use them knowing you built them yourself is a reward all on its own. Good luck with your own potential builds, and thank you so much for checking out all of these blog posts!

In our previous tutorials we have obtained our components and completed our drum pads, but we will now move on to the last component of the drum kit itself, the kick pedal.

While this final piece of the kit will complete our fully custom kit, it should be noted that, if you are looking fora smaller scale, less intensive project, just building this kick pedal to use with the stock RB drum kit is an excellent starting point. Like the drum pads, it performs worlds better than the stock hardware, and if you complete the pedal first, you can always loop back and eventually build out the entire kit after the fact to go with it. With all that in mind, let's get into the construction of the kit itself.

The Kick Pedal

The pedal is actually made up of a relatively small number of components, as seen in the image here. Its basic construction consists of a bass drum practice pad, a standard bass drum kick pedal, a sheet of plywood used as the base that helps to hold the practice pad and pedal together, and a magnetic switch that comes in two pieces, one which is attached to the wooden base, and the other which is attached to the kick pedal itself.

1. The Practice Pad and Audio Jack The practice pad and an attached audio jack. The tall body of the practice pad is hollow inside, and should be easily detachable from its own metal base with wrench or a screwdriver. As you see on this pedal I have built, I have attached a 3/4 audio jack to this pedal by drilling a hole in the top of the metal plate that holds the body of the practice pad onto its base. I attached a length of cable to the audio jack, and ran that cable through the hollow body of this practice pad, and attached it to the two connection points on the magnetic sensor which is itself attached to the wooden base. While this is the most elegant way I have found to attach our audio jack physically to body of the practice pad, it is a bit elaborate. You must first take the practice pad apart to do this, then drill a 1'' hole through the metal cover that comes off of the pad, which is a relatively small surface to begin with. If you want a quick and dirty solution to attaching the audio jack to pedal assembly, you can use duct tape, zip ties, or pretty much anything else you can think of that will serve to hold the audio jack in place. As long as it is relatively secure, and you take care when connecting/disconnecting audio cables from the jack, you should be good to go with any solution that holds the jack in place against the pedal assembly.

2. The Kick PedalThe kick pedal itself is simply a standard bass drum pedal, with a few modifications. The practice pad is built with an attach point for the bass pedal to screw onto, which will hold the front of the pedal in place. To make the pedal even more secure on the platform, we will attach the heel of the pedal to the wooden base as well. Your pedal should have one or more bolts that hold heel of the pedal together with the rest of the pedal's physical construction. Simply remove these bolts, take them to the hardware store, and find bolts with the same threading that are slightly longer than the originals (how much longer will depend on the thickness of wood you used for your pedal base). Drill out holes in your wooden base that match these bolts, and then run your new longer bolts through the wooden base, and attach them to the heel of you pedal, which should hold your pedal in place completely. We now have our magnetic sensor that we need to attach. One part of the sensor is attached to the wooden base of the pedal assembly. This is done by drilling small holes up through the wooden base, and running nuts and bolts through those holes to hold the sensor in place. You will need to pick bolts that are thin enough to pass through the holes in your sensor (I would suggest taking the sensor itself to the hardware store to match these up). You will also want to be sure that these bolts are relatively long, and get a handful of washers that match these bolts. At the same time, you will buy another set of these nuts and bolts that you will use to attach the top sensor to the metal kick pedal plate.

The sensor becomes activated when the magnet (attached to the pedal) comes within a certain distance of the magnetic switch (attached to the wooden base). Before you drill any of the holes to attach these sensors, make sure you first attach the practice pad and pedal to the wooden base. Once your pad and pedal are attached to the base, you can wire up your sensor to the audio jack, and then slide your two sensor pieces around relative to the base and the pedal to dial in their position. The sensor will likely become active when the two pieces are between 1/4'' and 1/2'' apart. Try to make the initial positions of the sensors a bit further apart that you might first expect. From there, you can adjust the position of the kick pedal hammer to help you tweak the sensor distance, since this will in turn change how low the kick pedal gets when it hits the pad. You can also use the washers we picked up earlier to add height to either of your sensors as needed, and help you further dial in the exact distance that you need between your two sensor pieces to achieve maximum sensitivity on your kick pedal within the game. While the sensor placement will take significant trial and error initially, once you dial it in, you should have to make very small changes to it in the future (if any). Just be sure that everything is tightened down tight once you have all of these pieces in a position that works for you.

3. Attach Points for the Practice Pad Just as we attach the bottom of the sensor and the kick pedal to the wooden base, you should also attach your practice pad by bolting it down. Your practice pad will likely come with a few screws that are run through existing holes already in its metal base. Simply move these and run your own bolts through them to attach the pad to the wooden base. As you can see in the original numbered image above, we have 2 visible bolts holding the pad's base in place, and there are 2 additional symmetrical bolts on the other side of the pedal assembly. Of these 4 bolts, 2 were threaded though existing holes in the practice pad base, and 2 were holes I drilled myself to further secure the pad to our wooden base. Using either 2 or 4 bolts should do the job, so start with the existing holes in the practice pad's base. Once you attach bolts through those, if the pad seems insecure or you just feel like going the extra mile, you can drill 2 (or more) additional holes through the base, and use those to attach the pad more securely.

4. The Magnetic Sensor ArrayDescribed in detail above. These are the two magnetic sensor pieces that, when brought in proximity to one another, create a circuit that is interpreted by the game as the kick pedal being down. It is worth noting that this is exactly the same way the stock RB pedal works, which is why you can simply attach this new kick pedal to any existing RB drum kit, and it should work flawlessly without any additional hardware modifications.

5. The Wooden Base A simple section of plywood, which is used to help hold the practice pad, kick pedal, and bottom magnetic sensor together. I would suggest using wood that is between 1/4'' and 3/4'' thick. Once you have your wood picked out, take some measurements of the width and length of your practice pad and kick pedal while they are attached together, and then cut your wooden platform accordingly. Make sure you pick out bolts for attaching your pedal/sensor/practice pad who's lengths take the thickness of the wood you have selected into account, and from there you should be good to go. Attach everything to your wooden platform as described above, and you should have a function kick pedal that you can use with either the stock RB kit, or with the other components of you completed custom kit.

And that about does it for part 3 of this tutorial. If you already have access to an Ion Drum Rocker drum brain and a Wired Legacy Adapter (for Xbox users), then congratulations, you are basically done with your custom kit! Simply plug everything into your Ion Drum Brain and test it out. After some testing and hopefully minimal adjustments, you should have a completely functioning custom kit that you can enjoy for years to come. If however, you are not fortunate enough to have these rare/legacy peripherals on hand, you will just have to do one more little project to make your custom kit a reality. In the upcoming final part of this tutorial, I will teach you how to modify and existing stock RB drum kit so you can attach your new drums to your Rock Band game of choice.

My apologies for the long delay between parts 2 and 3. I will do my best to get the final part of this tutorial up before the new year. Thanks for reading, good luck with your builds, and look out for the final part of this tutorial within the coming week!

In the first part of this tutorial, I provided information about most of the materials you will need to create your own custom kit. In the next 3 parts, I will go over most of the details involved in assembling your drum pads, building our kick pedal, and finally, connecting it all to your Rock Band version or choice.

Part 2: Building The Drum Pads

After acquiring your unmodified drums, the first thing you will need to do is start taking them apart. To do this, you will need a variety of tools I mentioned in the previous tutorial, as well as a drum key (if you don't already have one), a tape measure, a few markers, and some painters tape.

Preparing and Cutting the Drums

The first step to building the drum pads is to prepare our drums for modification. Look over your drums, and measure from the top and bottom of the drum to find the distance to the middle of the side of the drum. Remove any mounting hardware, branding signage, or air vents (a little metal hole on the side of the drums) that overlap with the middle of your drums. Most of these should be easily removable with a screwdriver, or possible a wrench, some needle nose pliers, or even a small pocket knife. You'll also want to remove the drum heads from the top and bottom of the drums, and set them aside. We will be using those as well a bit later on.

Once you have removed all extraneous hardware from the drums, its time to get ready to cut them in half. Take some painters tape, and tape all the way around middle of the drums. This should help to minimize any splintering or other unintended damage to the surface of the drum shell as we cut the drum apart. With the tape in place, grab your tape measure and a marker. Rotate around the drum a few inches at a time, measuring the center point between the top and bottom as you go, and making a dashed line on the tape around the drum. This will be the guiding line you will try to follow as you cut the drums apart. You'll want to try and cut your drums as close to the midpoint as possible to ensure they are roughly the same size, but don't sweat it too much if they don't come out perfectly. Even if your cuts are a little off center or imperfect, it should not affect their functionality.

To start cutting, take your jigsaw and position it in one of the holes along the side of the drum where you removed the mounting hardware/air vent. Begin cutting toward your center cut line, and then steadily along that line as you rotate and cut around the entirety of the drum. Do your best to cut gradually but consistently. Repeat this process for your other drum, and you will now have 4 drum pads ready to equip with sensor hardware.

Create Mounting Platforms For Our Sensors

Now that your drum pad shells are ready, we need to create a platform inside each one that will support our sensor hardware. Look at the inside of each pad shell, and make note of the position of all of the drum head mounting hardware held on by screws inside the shell. Set this shell on top of a spare piece of cardboard, and grab your marker again. Trace out a pattern inside the drum shell on this cardboard, with one spoke leading from the center of each screw that is holding the head mounting hardware onto the drums. Have each of these spokes lead to a central circular section that should be located approximately in the center of the drum. This circular section will be used to mount our sensor hardware within the drum. Once you are confident that your making on your cardboard is reasonably accurate, cut out this marked section of cardboard into a stencil similar to the one shown below.

With your drum stencils in hand, it is now time to cut out the platforms for our sensors. Take your stencils, and trace out 4 platforms onto your 2' x '4 sheet of particle board. Once these are all traced out, grab your jigsaw once again and cut each of these out of your particle board. To keep your wood from moving while you cut, you may want to have a second pair of hands help you out by holding things in place. Failing that, you might want to pick up a few sets of claps, and lock everything down onto a sturdy surface before you begin cutting. Again, as long as you take your time, don't sweat it too much if these platforms come out a little uneven. When in doubt, feel free to make your cuts slightly larger than your stencil trace, so that you have wiggle room to shave off a little later on in the event that your platforms are too large for your drum shells. Better to have that problem then to make them too small, and have to cut out a new platform from scratch.

With all of your platforms cut out, go back to each of your drum shells. Remove the bottom most screw that is holding each piece of the drum head mounting hardware in place. Take your angle brackets, and thread each screw you removed from the drum shell through one of these brackets. Tighten each screw down, which will attach these angle brackets to the inside of your drum, giving you a series of mounting points to place your sensor platform on. If the screws that originally came with the drums are not quite long enough to accommodate your angle brackets as well, simply take the original screws to the hardware store, and match up the size/threading to buy a handful of identical screws that are slightly longer than the originals.

Now that everything for our platforms is in place, we can attach our sensor platform to the inside of our drum. As you can see in the picture to the left, for my original kit, I somewhat lazily attached my platform to the angle brackets by applying adhesive pads between them. This has worked surprisingly well, but is also not as permanent as I would like (I have had to replace a handful of these pads over the years). When I built Alex's kit, I wanted to do a bit better than my original build, so I placed the sensor platform onto the brackets, marked where each hole lined up on the platform, and then drilled through the platform so I could attach each platform with nuts and bolts. If you are taking on this project yourself, I would suggest going the nuts and bolts route here for the sake of longevity, but in a pinch, the adhesive pad method should also serve you well for quite a while.

Attaching The Sensor

Now that the platform is attached, you are ready to attach your drum sensor to the platform. To start, measure from the wall of your drum to the center of your sensor platform. Cut two lengths of wire to roughly this measured length, and solder them to the two connectors on your stereo audio jack. Drill a hole in the side of each of your drum shells (I believe you will need a 1/2'' hole for this), insert your audio jack into the hole, and tighten it down using the attached washer and screw.

With the audio jacks in place, you will need your piezo sensors, adhesive pads, and your foam sanding brick. First, attach one of your adhesive pads to the bottom of your piezo sensor. Use this pad to glue your sensor as close to the center of the drum as possible to make it the most equidistant from all edges of the drum. Take your sanding block, and start cutting a smaller section of it off that will be placed on top of the sensor. Cut all of the sanding surface off, and cut your foam segment so that it is about the size of the surface of your sensor. Attach another adhesive pad to this foam block, and use this pad to attach your block to the top of your sensor. While cutting your foam block, make sure that to tom of the block protrudes ever so slightly over the rim of the drum when it is mounted into position on top of the sensor (somewhere between 1/4 and 1/8 of an inch above the rim should do). This should ensure just the right amount of contact between the sensor mechanism and the drum head once it is put in place and tightened down. Finally, now that the audio jack and drum sensor are both in place, solder the two wires leading from the audio jack onto the two wires leading from the piezo sensor. Since the wiring for this project is so simple, it shouldn't actually matter which wire is connected to which, but to keep things consistent, attach the red wire from the sensor to the wire that leads to the longer of the two prongs on your audio jack, and attach the black sensor wire to the shorter prong.

Modifying Your Drum Heads

With all the other parts of your drum pads completed, we just need to make some drum heads to cover them with. Take the original drum heads that came with your drums, and using a razor blade/xacto knife, cut the plastic head off entirely, leaving behind only the metal ring it was attached to. Take your roll of window screen, and measure and cut off 3 sheets of screen for each drum head. These sheets should be about 2 inches larger across than the diameter of the drum head they are going to be placed on. Start by cutting these screen sheets out as squares. Set your metal drum head ring over each square, and then cut the corners off of each square to attempt to make a hexagonal shape with each screen sheet. Take the first of these 3 sheets, as well as a needle and thread, and sew it around the metal ring you cut from the original drum head. The other two sheets will simply be placed on top of the sheet that is sewn around the metal ring, and all 3 of these sheets will be tightened down on top of the drum under the original drum head mechanism. Do your best to make sure that the screen is pulled completely taunt as you tighten it down, and try to pull any edges a bit to keep it smooth as you continue to tighten it down. Over time you will tear through the first layer or two due to regular use, so when that happens, you will simply take these layers and throw them away, replacing them with freshly cut sheets of window screen.

In Conclusion

That's it for part two of this tutorial! The next two parts will focus on the kick pedal and drum brain, and I'll get them done as soon as I can (at a minimum, I promise to finish this before the end of calendar 2017). In the meantime, hopefully the information above was helpful/informative. If you have any questions or issues, I'll try to keep up on the comments to each of these tutorials, and you can also catch me on Twitter here or here. Thanks for checking this out, and good luck with your potential builds!

Hello all,

With Alex about to crush it on the drums for the children, I wanted to finally get something up about the custom drums he'll be using all day. Earlier this year, I sent Alex a Custom Rock Band Drum Kit based on a set I had made for myself many years ago. I originally intended to document info on these in video form, but everyday life has continued to take almost every second of my spare time.

That said, I still want to get this info out to those who are interested, so for all the deeply invested Rock Band players out there looking for an awesome project, here are some instruction that will hopefully help you to make a custom kit of your very own.

Part 1: Materials

To complete this project, you are going to need some very specific materials, some easily sourced parts from your local hardware store, and a handful of general purpose household tools. I'll try to sum up the most specific parts to the best of my ability, so without further ado:

Drum Hardware and Mounting Gear

When I set out to complete this project initially myself, one of my main goals was to keep things as simple as possible in terms of materials, and to build as few things from scratch as possible. While it would be totally doable to build a drum body and mesh head mounting mechanism from the ground up, I didn't quite have the time or skill required to perform such a feat. After thinking it over, the simplest solution I came up with turned out to be a fairly elegant one: I would make my kit out of real existing drums. While you could take an entire drum kit as is and convert it into a Rock Band kit relatively easily, I had some additional goals on top of raw gameplay performance:

• I want my drums to be as quiet as possible
• I want them to take up a minimal amount space as for storage when not in use
• I want them to be easily mountable using some sort of standard, off the shelf product

Taking all of this into account, I scaled back from the thought of using an existing drum kit to a more conservative solution, building 4 drum pads out of two physical drums. The drums I have selected for each of these projects have been sets of matching Toms, one 12'' (to serve as the Blue and Yellow pads in RB) and one 13" (for the Red and Green pads). To turn two drums into 4 pads, you simply cut each complete drum in half. This works perfectly for our purposes since we don't need/want them to sound like drums anymore. It minimizes the materials needed to create them, and the space needed to store them. Finally, it makes our pads perfectly suited for mounting on most standard snare drum stands, since one half of each of the toms is very similar in size to your average snare drum.

To find your own drums for this project, you can check out your local music store to see if they have anything used for a reasonable price, or hit up eBay or Craigslist for additional options as well. Keep in mind, however, that you want to avoid drums that are built with certain mounting mechanisms. In the included image, the drum on the left has a mounting mechanism that covers the full length of the drum. since we wish to use this same mechanism in our final build, and also wish to cut the drum in half, this is a deal breaker. Look for drums that are put together like the one on the right when making a purchase.

When picking out stands to mount our new pads on, you will want to buy two sets of stands. The first set should have a lower maximum height, and be used for the Red/Green pads, and the second should have a higher height, for the Yellow/Blue pads. I have found these to be good for the low pads, and these for the high ones, but I'm sure there are plenty of others out there that will work just as well.

Finally, we need some existing drum gear to build the kick pedal. It's good to pick out a drum pedal that has open space at the base, which will be useful when mounting sensors later. Its also useful to find a pedal that has easily removable screws in its base near the heel, which you can remove and replace with slightly longer ones that will help hold the pedal to the new base you will build for it. In addition to the pedal itself, you will need a surface that the pedal will strike against during use. I have chosen to use an off the shelf practice pad, which suits our purposes well and isn't particularly loud compared to some possible alternatives.

Rock Band Drum Hardware

In addition to all of the actual musical gear you need to procure, you will also need some Rock Band gear to hook everything up to your console of choice once you are done. There are two ways this can be done. The first is to use the brain from the Ion Drum Rocker kit that came out many years ago, and simply plug all of your new gear into the standard 1/4'' audio jacks on that device (you will also need the Wired Legacy Adapter to connect the brain to your console if you are playing on Xbox One). If you are not fortunate enough to have this highly coveted piece of legacy gear however, there is still hope. although it will require some additional work. You should be able to modify any existing Rock Band kit that is compatible with your console and turn it into a drum brain similar to the one that shipped with the Ion kit. We'll get into more of the details on that later, but keep in mind that this modification will mostly destroy whatever kit you choose to use, so you may want to procure a second RB drum kit to carve up for this project.

Sensor Hardware

Now that we have our mechanical drum hardware accounted for, we need a few pieces of electrical hardware that match the sensors used in the standard Rock Band drum kits. All of the RB drum pads detect hits using piezo sensors to emit an electrical signal each time they are vibrated by your drum hits. You can find some examples of these sensor here, here and here. Almost any size should work in your pad setup, and you may even want to buy a few different kinds to experiment. I've personally had the best luck with sensors that are at least 30mm in diameter or larger.

As for the kick pedal, it uses its own magnetic sensor to detect hits and send them to the game. These sensors come in two pieces, and when these pieces come within close proximity of one another, a circuit is opened which registers a hit in the game. You can use simple magnetic security sensors for this, which function identically to the sensors built into stock RB drum pedals. It is worth noting however that you need to use "normally closed" (or N.C.) circuit sensors only for the purposes of this project. That is the type of signal that Rock Band hardware is designed to accept (the sensor I linked above should be a "normally closed" sensor).

Misc Tools and Odds and Ends

In addition to everything else listed above you will also need the following:

• A few sheets of plywood or particle board (2' x 2' and 2' x 4' should do, at around 1/4 and 1/2 inch thick.
• Various nuts, bolts and washers to attach wooden platforms and sensors to your drum hardware. You will need to buy some of these fresh based on measurements you will make later. Others you may need to acquire to replace existing screws on the drums you purchase that are not quite long enough after you add your additional hardware. Just take the old bolts to the hardware store and match up the size/threading.
• Some small angle brackets or corner braces (used to mount your sensor platform inside each drum pad).
• between 5 and 10 1/4 audio jacks, which you'll use to attach our drums to your drum brain (you'll need at least 5 for just your drums, and more if you have to modify a RB kit into a brain instead of using the one from the Ion kit).
• Some small (around 24 gauge) wire, some solder and a soldering iron, and possibly a multimeter to help you test your connections. Don't let this part of the project intimidate you. All the wiring required is dead simple, and you can find a ton of tutorials online that will run you through the basics of soldering in general if you are initially squeamish.
• Scissors or a few Exacto knifes or box cutters, a sewing needle and thread, and some standard window screen.
• Some mounting tape or adhesive pads, and one or two foam sanding blocks (which we won't actually be using to sand things).
• A Jigsaw, a power drill (with bits up to 1/2''), at lease one Philips and flat head screwdriver, and a small adjustable wrench.

That should do it for part one. I know I just dropped a ton of information, but don't let it overwhelm you. I'm by no means an expert in building anything, but I was able to put a few of these kits together relatively easily. With some patience and determination, you can totally do it too. If you are dedicated enough to still be playing Rock Band semi regularly in 2017, the difference in performance that you will get out of this custom kit will be a day and night experience compared to the stock drums. If you love chasing full combos or personal best high scores, you won't beat this kit.

I'll do my best to finish this tutorial over the next few days, but until then, tune into the Extra Life streams, open your wallets, and give what you can to help the kids!