Thursday, August 21, 2008

A unique yet effective Rock Band Mod

Hi folks, Raikan here for my first blog post for the band. This has been a long time in the making, but this is worth it.Many of you recognize the above photo. The bane of most people when you start drumming... the drum pedal. This insidious piece of hardware is used in some interesting beats and some songs are just overzealous in it's use... what happens when you play though?
Yep! Broken pedal. Now you're done, the pedal is physically snapped into 2 pieces and is now unusable. But other than contacting Harmonix directly and getting a new pedal. (Which we've done since we've snapped 2 pedals already). We decided on a different approach after getting one new pedal back. Tracing the shape of the pedal onto a board. 5/8" plywood actually, we spent the time to cut out a piece of wood to make into a new base using a jig saw.Tah-dah! The result. 4 screws later, 2 in each piece of the broken pedal. Just regular wood screws. Carefully placed not to hit the magnet at the top of the pedal. And we have a new very very sturdy pedal. Ok, it's not the most visually pleasing, but it's functional. It's a little rough on bare feet too. I plan on taking the wood off, giving the top edge a pass of the router, and I'm even going to put a tiny counter sink on the screw heads so they don't stick up a little. Sand the whole thing smooth and reinstall it back onto the pedal and we should be good as new with a nice pedal. We could probably paint it if we wanted. Or put the band's logo on it too.

As I said earlier, we have 2 broken pedals. But we're leaving the 2nd one in it's broken state as we wait to see if Harmonix wants us to send back a broken one to replace the new one they sent us. If they say they don't want it. Stay tuned for a second mod that we have planned for that pedal.

3 comments:

Bongoo said...

Great work Raikan!

That will keep us rocking until we get the Ion drummer or the new RB2 steel reinforced ones...

Or maybe we'll personalize this one and keep using it! :)

Phoenix5096 said...

We should sell these on ebay. I know some people are already selling a metal plate to attach to the pedal. But wood is so much more satisfying!

FYI: How do you like my pink carpet ! :p

DMan3021 said...

I have to say that this mod makes the pedal a lot less flimsy, and therefore a lot more fun to play!