Get rid of the thwack thwack forever!
Ok, so Rock Band hasn’t landed in the UK yet but even so there’s one problem that everyone will suffer from. It’s got nothing to do with hammer-ons and pull-offs or even synching the game to your LCD panel. No, the biggest feature of Rock Band, the drum kit, is also its biggest problem.The issue is those rubberised plastic pads that make up the drum pads. Whack them with a drum stick and you get a loud ‘thwack’ noise with every strike. Get someone half decent on the drums playing on hard and the thwacking is constant… Pretty soon, unless you turn your sound system up to 11, you’ll find the drums drown out the tune you’re supposed to be playing.
So I hunted for a solution to this noisy drummer problem. My first thought was from the point of view of the drummer. With every hit, unless you really concentrate on playing softly, you can’t hear what the in-game drums sound like anyway, as a resounding thwack drowns out each drum sound. So I plugged some headphones into my TV and sure enough I could now hear the drums in the song.
Click for larger imageBut it wasn’t so good for my band mates who still had to put up with thwack, thwack, thwack all through each song. So the only answer was to somehow deaden the sound of stick on pad but without making the pads unresponsive. The challenge was on!
