Rock Band Drum Set

Designed for and bundled with Harmonix's Rock Band, this drum set features four colored drum pads and one foot-activated floor pedal  that correspond to notes on the screen. Each input represents at least one part of the drum set. Red can be the snare drum or hi-hat closed. Yellow can be the hi-hat closed or a tom. Blue can act as a tom, ride cymbal, hi-hat open, or cowbell. Green can be the crash cymbal or another tom. The kick pedal is always the bass drum. The legs of the drum set can be raised and lowered to accommodate the size and shape of the player. Additionally, the legs can be removed altogether if the player wants to use it on a table. The drums also feature standard console buttons and directional pad controls to facilitate menu navigation.

Other Uses
The drum also has other various uses. One of these uses is to plug it into your computer with the USB port and with special drivers make the drumpads and various buttons work in almost any sort of application.

Problems

When Rock Band was released, each instrument had various problems. There were a couple of different drum set models release, each had noticeable problem. The first set was the QM. This set was very sensitive. It was always accurate and responsive for basic drum patterns. The only problem was that it was too sensitive for drum rolls making the user miss many of the notes. The next set was the EL. It was not as sensitive as the QM so users needed to hit the drums harder for the game to register the notes. The problem with it was that the drum set would frequently not register hits making it difficult to keep a combo. Solutions have been found for both of these problems. The Sock Mod (for the QM) put socks around the pads of the drums to dampen the pads to allow easier rolls. The Coin mod (for the EL) required more tinkering to work. The tops of the pads must be removed and you had to tape nickels between the pad and sensor.

Along with these issues people found that the drum pads were very loud. Solutions were to put things on top of the pads such as  a sock or cloth. But a more usual way to avoid this problem was to play rubber bands on the ends of the drum to make them bouncier so that they did not hit so hard. When Rock Band 2 was released the new set of drums was much quieter and this was less of a problem.