We bought Rock Band 2 a week after it was released, and after getting our groove on, we hopped online and ordered the ION Premium Drums, having sold out Rock Band drums months earlier. We held off on a pre-order because of the price, but who can resist the allure of a more customizable drum setup when Rock Band 2 is already in your possession?
We won’t bother with a full-on review of the drums because there are plenty such reviews out there already. What we will say is that despite being a tad top-heavy, the drums are a joy to play with. Unfortunately, we had to delay playing with them after we set them up, because upon tightening the wing-nut to fasten our blue drum, we heard a weak “snap” and noticed that the O-ring that holds the drum in place separated from the screw it was attached to. We’re guessing these two pieces are epoxied at the factory, and somehow we got a dud, because we didn’t tighten the wing-nut on this drum any more than we did the wing-nut for the others. We can’t help but think the design for this pieces is poor, as the screw could easily have been longer and “hooked” at one end so as to make the O-ring unnecessary.
In any case, rather than disassemble everything and pack it back up, we did what any hobbyist would do: we grabbed the super-glue and decided to put the two pieces back together ourselves. Fortunately, super-glue worked, and we were off and playing after waiting for the glue to dry.
Unfortunately, a week later, and the banging away at the set caused the blue drum to sag sadly, because the super-glue didn’t hold what with all the drum-pounding we did. Surprisingly, the screw and O-ring are a very tight fit even without any new super-glue, but we’re off to try the homebrew fix again. We also sent ION a message through their web site hoping that they’d send out a replacement part, rather than have us pack everything up again and return it to Amazon. (It’s a piece that has to cost, what, $1 or so?)
We’ll keep readers apprised as to how ION responds.
Update (10/02/2008): Our e-mail to ION resulted in an automated response to check the FAQ. There, we found their Technical & Warranty Support number (401-658-3131). We were able to get through to a representative immediately, who quickly provided us with a form to fax in for replacement parts. Unfortunately, the representative also said that the part we needed may not be readily available given how popular the product has been, so we may have to wait a little while. In the meantime, our super-glue method has held, though we haven’t actually hit the affected drum yet to see if it fails again. Nonetheless, props to ION for having great customer service, even if it takes an extra week to get us the part in question.
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