After my nightmarish experience with the Guitar Hero World Tour Drum Kit, I was a little wary of spending more money on another one.  You can read all about how I came about this set in the previously mentioned review.

This drum kit, which came in the Beatles Rock Band bundle, is a Rock Band 2 drum kit with a new paint job and a couple of new features.  Instead of one jack for the kick pedal to plug into, there are now 2, allowing for 2 kick pedals.  These can be used for the Expert+ difficulty setting in Guitar Hero Metallica and Van Halen which feature heavy double bass notes, or they can also be used in the Rock Band series to take some of the load off of one foot doing the work.  Previously Rock Band had offered a special splitter (I have one of those too) but this updated drum set requires no such device.  During peak popularity, extra pedals were very easy to find, mostly due to problems with the plastic breaking, a problem that would taint both franchises.  The Beatles Rock Band was the first kit offered with a reinforced pedal as the standard.

A small difference between the 2 drum kits should not be ignored; the bar at the bottom between the supports, on which the kick pedal(s) rest.  Guitar Hero would implement this structural element in their Guitar Hero 5 bundle, but by then it was too late.  I had already been massively let down by their drum peripheral and fully converted to Rock Band drums.  This stabilizing bar makes operation of the kick pedal a lot easier than the shifting, sliding, abomination Guitar Hero created.  Indeed the kick pedal was THE most difficult facet of electronic drumming to master, but after using it on Rock Band’s kit it became a matter of reflex within days.

I actually bought the extra pedal and splitter long before I had the Rock Band drums in an attempt to find a fix for placing 2 pedals on the Guitar Hero set.  Note that this DOES NOT WORK, and despite how well most of these games and peripherals interact with each other across games and the 2 franchises, it would appear that the pedals are NOT interchangeable.  Weird, but I’ll forgive them because it’s nothing short of a miracle that instrument controllers from one series work just as well in the other.

The other big feature was a slew of extra jacks located on the kit that were not related to the kick pedal.  The relevance of these inputs wouldn’t become clear until Christmas of 2011 when Rock Band 3 was released and the subsequent Pro Cymbals Expansion was introduced.  They plug into the drum kit without much hassle and work great.  Four pads, 3 cymbals, and 2 kick pedals make for a monster of a controller.  A damn shame the entire genre fell the fuck off immediately following the 2011 holiday season.

When it comes to the performance of this instrument peripheral, I couldn’t be happier.  I never was able to get the full experience with the Guitar Hero World Tour Drum Kit but after a little practice with Rock Band’s refined attempt I was blazing through some of the lower level songs on Hard with no problem.  Pads are very responsive and the kit as a whole is more stable than the World Tour drum (even with the cymbal expansion) and the lack of the mid-level cross-bar allows for a higher degree of comfort.  Be in the angle, spacing, or something else I haven’t been able to deduce, the Rock Band drum kit makes the physical act of drumming much, much easier.

I’d also like to take a second to address cross compatibility since one of the first questions anyone asks is how does one work with the other when the Rock Band kit  has 4 pads but World Tour has 5?  Oh and before you start looking to the cymbal expansion for answers, this doesn’t factor into the “regular” play of drums at all, it’s an entirely special feature exclusive to Rock Band 3’s “Pro” mode.  Anyway, I’m not sure how the games do it, but if a Rock Band kit is used with a Guitar Hero game, the charts magically roll the green and orange “notes” all into one, and it just takes a smack on the green pad to play.  Does this lower the difficulty factor of what Guitar Hero had intended?  Maybe, but what good is any of it with a shitty drum set?  Now that I think about it, the drum kit packed with The Beatles Rock Band is Rock Band’s most up-to-date drum peripheral since no drums for Rock Band 3 were ever manufactured.

You’ll be hard pressed to find any of this in any stores anymore.  I’m sure a bunch of used ones are floating around but because of how much physical stress these controllers underwent I would never buy a used one unless I could be assured a refund if defective.  So yes, this might have been a hell of a lot more useful circa 2010, but for what it’s worth, this is an excellent piece of fake plastic rock to own.  I would even go as far as to say it’s really the best drum set out there (from either Rock Band or Guitar Hero at least) but I can’t truly make this statement as I never bothered with the kit from Guitar Hero 5.

Reviewed by The Cubist