Last Friday was another fun Rock Band night. Thanks to Jon, Neil, Sean, and everyone else who helped get everything set up.  We spiced up this RB night with a few new ingredients. First off, of course, is Rock Band 2!  (We like!) We also picked up one of those Ion Drum Rocker kits.  All the righties were really impressed with this premium kit. But, I’m going to go off on a bit of semi-self-indulgent tangent here, so feel free to ignore the following rant about how the world continually conspires against lefty drummers…

So, as you may have figured out from the opening paragraph, I’m a lefty.  I was also a drummer in a band for a few years. (For perspective, pretty much everyone in NYC has been in a band. Sometimes even without their knowledge. It’s a fun town.) Whenever we played out, a few things would always happen:

• We would get a chance to see our family and friends (because that’s mostly the only people who came to see us)
• We would be really tired the next day at work
• And, I would get that look from the sound guy

Any lefty drummer can relate to that look. It means the sound guy is thinking:

• Oh, great.  A lefty…
• Now I haveta wait for this guy to move all the drums around. (a lefty plays with the drums flipped horizontally from a righty’s setup – the snare drum must be moved from the left side to the right, hi-hat too, and so on.)
• Then I haveta move all the drum mikes
• And then recheck all the levels…
• And then, worst of all, when the next band comes on, I gotta put it all back to where it was before!

It’s not fun to be around people who hate you for your handedness.

(If you were wondering, it turns out sound guys use a lot of contractions. Old gypsy curse.)

Fast forward to the release of Rock Band last year.

Rock Band brought the fun of keeping a beat to the masses. It’s an awesome drum sim among other things. And, Rock Band’s drum set has a great solution for the lefty/righty drummer conflict: The set is symmetrical and there is an in-game switch that flips which colors correspond to which piece of the drum set. So, to move the snare drum from the left side (red pad) to the right side, (green pad), just pause the game, select “Lefty” and then continue rocking.  Of course, when a righty drummer takes over for the next song, they usually forget to switch off lefty mode… This usually results in some boo’s from the other players and onlookers unhappy about the break in the action.  But the whole process only takes a few seconds. In short, it’s really fast and easy to switch between lefty and righty drummers.  Years of that look vanished in an instant. It was cathartic.

Fast Forward to last Friday.

Powerhead has made a few rhythm-games in its lifetime. And, with a former drummer running things, we had enough reasons to pick up the Ion Drum Rocker. Amazon punted the delivery date twice, but a local merchant, J&R, had them in stock. (You really can get almost anything any time in this city. Have I recently mentioned how much we ♥ NYC?) The Ion Drum Rocker looks cool. It has four drum pads, like the original Rock Band set, but adds two cymbals. When we first tried the set, after a big drum fill I actually tried to silence the cymbal by grabbing it. Everyone laughed at my nostalgia trip.

But, why the hate on lefties? The Ion Drum Rocker is very configurable, but it’s not as full featured in lefty mode as it is in righty mode. It’s also not designed to easily go back and forth between lefty and righty. As you can imagine, that look returned with a vengeance.

The remote module (the device that sends the drum pads’ signals to the game system) doesn’t allow you to map a cymbal to the left (red) pad. This means the drum set is *not* symmetrical. Also, in freestyle mode — where you get to jam away on your electronic drum kit — righty (default) mode maps the drums and cymbals perfectly. The four pads are a snare and three toms, and the two cymbals are a hi-hat or ride and crash. Unfortunately, when you switch to lefty mode in freestyle, the kit throws away the crash and two of the toms.

We checked to see if people were having similar problems. We found a few, for example:

“Readjust the pads and cymbals, kind of flawed because of no red cymbal option but there’s only 10% of you right?”

“Flip all the pads around, then play facing a mirror that’s reflecting your tv.”

Someone made a video detailing part of the problem.

We also discovered some makeshift solutions, requiring extra equipment (a splitter from Radio Shack) which can make the red cymbal a crash, but doesn’t free up the red pad to be a tom. That is, they are both wired to the crash. Even with this hack, the out of the box experience is still anti-lefty. (Insert political propaganda joke here. Or not.)If anyone has any solutions, or corrections, please let us know.

Also, this is a relatively minor gripe about a really great game and some cool hardware.  It’s been fun to watch my friends “get it” when they lock into a drumming groove in a song. We will certainly continue to have regular Rock Band nights, featuring the Ion Drum Rocker.

Maybe the price to pay for a more realistic drum set is a more realistic simulation of the other parts of drumming: Extra time to switch from lefty players to righty players and back again; and, sadly, the return of that look.

We now return you back to your regularly scheduled corporate propaganda.