// Author: turbopunk
// Last Modified: 1/28/09 08:18 am
// Description: Rock Band Ion Drum Rocker Early Impressions
public journal post() {
I don't have much time before I need to go to class, but I wanted to get up a few of my initial impressions of the Rock Band Ion Drum Rocker kit. If you are not familiar with that name / product, the Drum Rocker is a full electronic drum kit that comes with a custom drum "brain" that acts like an Xbox 360 controller.
Let me start out by saying, first and foremost, that the kit is awesome. It plays well. It is very responsive. It's quieter than my old Rock Band 1, standard issue drum kit.
One very nice, and completely unexpected feature, of the custom brain is that it knows what you are hitting. The game give you a standard note chart of four colors. This causes a few of the colors to have split identities. For example, the green note represents both a floor tom and and crash cymbal. When you are playing an actual song in the game, it doesn't matter whether you hit the green pad or the green cymbal. You get credit for the hit, and the right note is played. However, during drum fills, fuck off time before and after a song and in the freestyle mode of the drum trainer, the game knows the difference between the two hits and plays the correct sound.
Not everything is perfect, though. My first complaint is that the kick pedal that comes with the set is horrible. I tried to use it for about 30 minutes. After that time, I gave up and used some patch cables to go back to my original Rock Band kit pedals. For those that know about electronic drum kits, the problem is that that kit comes with a pedal that is meant to be the pedal for a hi hat. Most drummers that use electronic drum kits use standard analog kick pedals that hit pads. Even the website for the product admits that you'd want to replace the pedal with a real pedal for use as a drum kit.
Next, the cymbal I current am using for the hi hat doesn't seem responsive enough. I'm not going to spend too much time on this fact, due to the fact that the crash cymbal is fine. I may just have a bad cymbal. After I swap around some things, I'll mention in the full review if the problem persists.
My final issue is one of personal preference. One of the great selling features for the product is the fact that you can reconfigure the pads and cymbals to any positioning that you find comfortable. Granted, in the 6 hours I played around with the thing last night, I think every single piece of that kit moved at least onces until I found my "sweet spots." However, I have not found a way to put the hi hat and crash cymbals exactly where I'd like. I would like to put them in the one place you can't put something; I'd like to put them exactly where the vertical poles for the stand are located. I'm sure I can find a way to get them to these positions, but it's not possible to do "out of the box."
Overall, I'm really looking forward to going in depth with this product. After my session last night, it's clear that I will have to reteach myself how to play the game. Fortunately, with a piece of equipment as solid as the Drum Rocker, I look forward to the challenge.
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