Rock Band 2 Stratocaster seems ... lacking

MetroidZoid

I've noticed that the Stratocaster guitar I got in my RB2 set (Wii, if it matters) seems to be having issues with the strum bar as of lately. It's not registering every hit, and I've already gone through, checked and rechecked calibration, everything is fine. Also, the guitar that I got from the RB1 set still works fine, and has no problems with the same set of calibrations. I'm 99.9% it's the strum bar alone that's causing the problem, especially because when I'm navigating the menus, it only register's about 2/3 of the time for every up or down direction.

So ... I've heard rumors of do-it-yourself fixes, but am hesitant to try, obviously this voids any warranty. Speaking of that, however, can you still send in an instrument to Harmonix if it's stopped working, just not necessarily out-of-the box? I bought this in January, so it's still under a year old, and I still have the receipt, I'm just trying to figure out the easiest fix.

Thank you for any help.

Arikado

The EA warranty for it is only for 60 days. Unfortunately, all the sites to help you with some DIY Stratocaster things are blocked at work. I would advise looking at the Hardware section of the rockband.scorehero.com forums. Make sure you look for Wii guitars since they're likely wired differently from the other consoles.

MetroidZoid

So ... update

Today I decide, that after sitting in front of the plastic guitar for 3 weeks straight, and drawing detailed schematics of what could be in the guitar (most of which included various worm-holes, hamster-powered pistons, and various sexy pneumatics), that I would crack that shit open.

Very carefully. With a screwdriver.

Aaaand I've come to the conclusion that I can do nothing further. Apparently, and unbeknownst to me, while the first RB guitars use a set of metal switches to detect the strum bar, the RB2 guitar uses mysterious alien magnets, unknown to even our top scientists. Really, though, it's magnets, and I can't adjust magnets. I'm thinking maybe that when my cat's knocked the guitar off the couch once or twice, it may have jarred it enough to de-magnetize it silghtly? Anyways, right now I'm considering one of the replacement switches that I've seen advetised and reccomended on a few Rock Band related forums out there.

We'll see how this goes.

vonPoonBurGer

MetroidZoid wrote: »

Really, though, it's magnets, and I can't adjust magnets.

No, but you can adjust the "rest" and "strum" positions so the magnets are closer to the sensor that detects them. That magnet is probably supposed to trip a Hall effect sensor, but the whole strum bar is out of alignment so it doesn't come close enough to trip the sensor.

Also, I'm not certain on this, but I honestly doubt that your cats knocking the guitar off the couch would have generated sufficient force to demagnetized those magnets.

MetroidZoid

Any idea on how to adjust the positions? I'm finding difficulty in finding fixes for any RB2 stratocasters right now, but probably because I am horrible at Google-fu, and at a certain point today figured I'd might as well just see what the thing looked like inside, see if anything popped out at me in a moment of inspiration.

...

It didn't.