Music Gaming Goodness: Rock Band 2 Rocks The House
by Derek Wilson on October 24, 2008 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
A Quick Detour: Setting Up The Drums
Playing the drums, and by extension, playing with the drum controller on Rock Band 2, can be quite a work out. This gets even more amplified when people make it harder on themselves than it needs to be. There are ways that you can set up your drums, your throne (that's what drummers call the seat they sit on to play), and hold yourself in order to minimize the work you do while playing the game.
Some of the hardest stuff to do, because practice is required, are rolls and fast kick drum work. With both of these techniques, proper strength and endurance are required no matter how much natural timing a person has. And there are some songs that people can just brute force their way through, but you'll have an easier time both learning how to do these things and playing for an extended period of time if you follow these suggestions.
First, you need to determine how high you should sit. If you are sitting too high or too low, you'll be wasting a lot of energy every time you lift your leg to play the kick drum. When you are resting with your foot on the kick pedal, you want you knee to be slightly below your hip. Your leg should be nearly parallel to the ground, but you'll have a little bit more endurance if you are just a bit higher (if the angle your knee makes is a little greater than 90 degrees). This will be true whether you play with your heel up or down. An adjustable drum throne is the way to go, but you can also get by with adjustable chairs. Stools and fixed chairs are kind of hit or miss, and if more than one person is planning on playing drums a lot, you'll really want to go with something that can be raised and lowered easily.
After getting your seat height set, you'll want to look at where to position the drums. Sitting on your throne with your arms relaxed at your sides, lift you hands (bending at the elbows) until your forearms are parallel with the ground. You'll want the vertical center of the red and green drums to be at the height of your finger tips. When actually playing the drums, you'll want to hold your arms at about this angle (you'll need to shift slightly when moving between drums obviously), but in order to conserve energy, you will want to do most of your playing with your wrists.
We could get a lot more into technique, but there are plenty of resources around for those who really want to dig this deep. Whether or not you decide to play Rock Band 2 like a drummer would play the drums, playing the game will be easier on you if you set the drums up as I've outlined and remember to sit up straight. Good posture and the positioning of your seat and the drums will go a very long way to helping improve your experience with the game.
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Myrandex - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Umm I don't think rockband implies talent.I have no musical talent, and nor to I desire to obtain any musical talent. I can't even read sheet music when someone was teaching me, and it didn't bother me in the slightest bit.
The point of RB is fun. That's it. I used to think that all of these types of games were lame, until a friend brought over Guitar Hero 2. We played it until 3 am, and afterwards I realized that these games were fun (until you had to play lame songs, which is still a fault).
And I agree that this game is to music as FPS is to Military Training; after an intense CS session I certainly am not ready to head to cs_iraq and preventing the terrorist from setting us up the bomb!
explovewhisper - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
Rock Band was released on November 3, 2009 on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii consoles, supports all existing Rock Band instruments https://nhacchuong68.com/Myrandex - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Good article...I love RB and RB2, although I will admit with some of the songs I just think "WTF is this song doing in here" and here are SOOO many songs that I want to play on there that are not available.
I wish that there was some way to import songs into the game and define the tracks (or even let the game automatically decide that, although that'd take a lot of programming and remove a profit area from Harmonix with DLC), because frankly even the songs that are on DLC aren't the ones that I want to play. Sure some are there, but not the ones that I crave to play. And I am sure that there are plenty of other people in the same position as myself, and I am also sure that plenty of other people would not like the songs that I want. Thats the joy in everyone having their own invidial tastes (Rammstein is the band that I'd love to see more than anyone else on there for example)...
I remember 1 song on RB2 on expert on guitar was seriously just the green button at a certain interval that was not difficult at all (a lame rappish type song)...it didn't belong there at all! I fell asleep playing it on expert :-/
I don't play the drums often, but I will admit that the pedal from RB1 does frustrate me and the lack of an adjustable chair makes playin git uncomfortable (long legs makes it hard to hit the bedal properly because my knee will be bent at a less than 90 degree angle), so I pretty much just play guitar (or base). It is still fun though and I'd recommend it to anyone.
Jason
webstorm1 - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I have a PS3, and there is an option to queue songs for multiple song downloads. You can select Download in the background, so you don't have to wait for any song to download before moving on. Then you just go to the game navigation menu (can't remember the exact name, but it's the one you would use to actually start a game from) and select each song after it has downloaded to install it. I'm guessing this is an Xbox 360 limitation in the online service, so it may even be fixed if anyone cares to do so.Myrandex - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I couldn't quite figure out on page 1 what the author was trying to say for "You what you would if you..." slightly under the picture.Jason
Gary Key - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Corrected now, had a HTML tag error there...Devo2007 - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Instead of saying "The Premium Drum Kit" I think you should specifically mention that it's the ION Drum Rocker somewhere in the first half of page 5 -- it made things rather confusing when you kept saying "Premium Drum Kit" and then randomly referring to the kick pedal as the "ION Kick Pedal."DerekWilson - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
thanks for the advice. i updated the page.Diosjenin - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I have to thank you for the thoroughness with which you've dissected the drum kit(s) in particular. I don't actually own either 1 or 2, but I've played the first one a few times and the critiques you gave of the first set I feel are quite accurate, so I certainly trust the critiques you give of the new one(s).I do have to ask - is there an option to designate the hi-hat as the leftmost 'drum' rather than the one second from the left on the non-premium kit (where I presume you can just switch the pads)? If there's an option in either 1 or 2 to change this, do let me know, but I haven't ever played on a system where that's been the case, and not being able to play with my right arm crossed over my left remains my primary qualm with the drum setup as a whole - even above the horrible bass pedal feel and construction...
DerekWilson - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
you can't reassign pads and must rely on what the programmers defined for each song.this is definitely the most frustrating thing for me. having the flexibility of the premium kit here is nice as you can, for whatever song, make it "right" usually by switching the plugs in the brain for the yellow and red pads.
it still just makes me want to buy a real electronic drum kit and a kickbox though.