Guitar Hero: Soldering
I really like plastic instrument music games. I’ve owned almost every version of Rock Band and Guitar Hero (except GH: Aerosmith because that’s just stupid). Last year when we moved into our house, I chose the Rock Band side of the “which plastic band set will you own” war. And while I am still completely satisfied with the music selection in Rock Band, the peripherals weren’t up to snuff. I used the drums because it was all I had, but I reverted to my Guitar Hero 3 Les Paul for the guitar “playing”.
Anyway, when Guitar Hero: Metallica sucked me into the GH Band setup, I decided to add the Guitar Hero drum set to my collection. I have to say that not only are those drums far superior to the Rock Band set, but it seems as if more care was put into the note-tracking so that you really feel like you could play the songs on a real drum set.
The happiness I felt for the drum set made me go and purchase a copy of Guitar Hero: World Tour so that I could have more songs to “drum” along with. I found a person on Amazon selling a used copy along with the new GH:WT guitar (which I kind of liked) on the cheap. So, I bought it and it was shipped to me in a couple of days.
I popped the game in and copied it to my HDD (a good way to test if the disk is readable) and then sat down with my new guitar to try it out. The strum bar acted a little funny in the menus, but I chalked it up to some lag and went into a song. Then I started missing notes. Almost every note. This was not good.
Deciding to go ahead and void the warranty, I popped it open and took a look at the strum bar switches. Everything seemed alright, so I used this guide to tighten the switches and try to improve the performance of the strum bar. After putting the guitar back together, it worked fine for a while, but soon reverted back to its note-missing self.
By this time, I was fed up with it, so I decided to go all-out and just replace the switches altogether. There is a great how-to on the same site as the tightening guide, so I went out and bought a couple switches, some solder, and gave it a shot.
I took the guitar apart again, heated up the soldering iron and started melting the old solder away. After an eternity of breathing in some fumes, I could finally pry the switches away from the board. I put the new switches on and soldered them into place.
After putting everything back together, the mechanics of the guitar seemed tighter, and I was getting a more satisfying “click” from the strum bar. Now it was time to test it for real. I fired up GH: Metallica and turned on the guitar. Success! At least so far. The menus responded to the clicks on the strum bar without hesitation. I proceeded to play through five songs in the game and missed zero notes because of the strum bar. I did it! I fixed it!
I’m pretty proud of myself since I hadn’t soldered anything since some stained glass in high school, and it felt good to be able to fix something that was broken. It would be nice to try to mod a real guitar with the plastic buttons, but there’s no way that would happen with my limited time. I’m just excited that I did it on my own, and I didn’t screw up the guitar beyond repair in the process.