Rock Band guitar fix

Rock Band is an intense and satisfying game. Playing it evokes the feeling I had when playing Guitar Hero for the first time. But a dissection or review of the game is not the purpose of this post. Maybe I’ll write more about my experiences later, but there’s a more pressing matter at hand.

A friend of mine secured his copy at a midnight launch and played through it a few hours before me. He took the time to browse the official forums and warned me of an issue a lot of players have encountered – a faulty strumbar on the included guitar. Well, as chance would have it, I soon encountered the issue after playing the guitar for several hours. Basically, the symptoms are that the guitar works just fine out of the box, but after several hours of playing, the strumbar begins to act finicky. For me, I do a lot of down strums, so the down strum began failing to register. Also, if I held the strumbar down, sometimes multiple strums would register.

These are clear signs of a mechanical failure (which is much easier to fix than an electrical one). So I decided to open it up and check out what was wrong. The issue appears to be that the metal contacts used by the strumbar are bending ever so slightly out of shape after repeated use, making what was once a clean connection turn into a bouncy one.

I was able to resolve the issue with a quick, low-tech fix that requires only a screwdriver and some paper. I’m sure there are many other ways to approach the problem, but I’ll share my super simple solution with the rest of you, so you rockers out there can rest easy knowing that your so-weet Stratocaster will be just fine.

Here are the five easy steps:

1. Unscrew and remove all screws on the back of the guitar body (NOT the ones on the front of the body or behind the neck). Make sure you remember which screw lengths go into which holes.
2. Remove the back plate and look for the strumbar area. You will see two sets (one for each strum direction) of two thin strips of metal that are supposed to make contact with each other when the strumbar is hit.
3. Cut two very small strips of paper and fold each one in half twice. The size does not need to be precise. They just need to be small enough to accomplish the next step.
4. In each set of contacts, there are two pieces of metal. One piece is further from the strumbar than the other. Jam the piece of paper between that furthest contact and the plastic adjacent to it (and not between the two contacts). Repeat for the other set of contacts (in case up strum ever wants to break, too).
5. Replace the guitar’s back plate and screw everything back in.

Here’s a picture of what the strumbar region should look like after the fix:

You see those two white squares on the two opposite sides of the strumbar? Those are the pieces of paper I shoved in there.

After several more hours of stress testing, I can say that this fix was a smashing success. I hope this helps some frustrated guitarists out there. Rock on!

UPDATE: It turns out that the root problem is that the contact fixture is rotating slightly, putting space between the plastic tip of the strumbar and the plastic on the contact. With a little bit of space between the plastic parts, the strum will only close the circuit when the strumbar is in midstrum, which leads to double-strums. As the plastic pieces move further apart, the strum won’t register at all. The reason the paper fix worked is because it basically forced the contact fixture to rotate closer to its correct orientation (by applying torque in the opposite direction), and it somewhat prevented further rotation of the fixture. Regardless, it is admittedly a dirty fix, but you can find the more thorough solution here, in case the paper solution isn’t doing it for you.

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