From day 1 of playing Guitar Hero 2 on the Xbox 360 (my first GH experience) I strived for acquiring the "Kick the Bucket Award" achievement. That is, beat the song Jordan by Buckethead on Expert level. I'm a drummer, not a guitarist, so my left hand just could not keep up in Solo Section B. I didn't want to spend years developing my middle finger hammer-on speed (main reason: I've developed a cyst on the knuckle of that finger from playing GH2!)... so I set out to develop a finger tapping mod for the X-plorer controller that comes with the game.
Let's get this out of the way... Is this a "cheat"? Well, yes and no. It's arguable. Yes, a cheat, because I'm using a device that others don't have access to, yet they are faced with beating Jordan on Expert, too, using default controllers. No, not a cheat, because the software of GH2 does not recognize starting riffs with a hammer-on, i.e. finger-tap. You must always strum to start a run. So this mod allows you to start/play runs without strumming, using pure finger tapping, which is something you can do on a real guitar. Not only that, it still takes a certain amount of skill to use this mod. It's not like I transcribed the note chart into a USB playback device and pressed play. I had to put in some serious practice to use this improvement to the controller to succeed.
So, with this mod, I've finally beat Jordan on Expert. I got a 4-star rating, too! I'm totally geeked. It was an awesome feeling being able to play the entire song and hit most of the notes! Okay, on to the technical details of the mod...
If anybody wants more details on how to build this, or how I used this to beat Jordan (I had to isolate certain sections of the song and work them out), send me a message to my Gamertag above. If there's enough interest, I can put more detail on this page. For now, to those players familiar with the sections of Jordan, here are the spots I used finger tapping on:
Guitar Break (used both hands to tap)
End of Solo A (like the break, but backwards)
All of Solo B (hardest part, once you master this, you can beat the song, I used a combination of normal fret buttons with left hand + finger tap buttons with right hand)
Bridge (similar to Solo B, used combination of left on fret, right on tap)
Everything else was normal strumming and left-hand fretting. And of course I used star power to get through Solo C and the solo before the bridge.
UPDATE: Here's a video of me passing Jordan for the 2nd time, one year after my first Jordan win with this mod...
Simply stated: I wanted 5 fret buttons, each of which simulated a strum. Such buttons simulate guitar "finger tapping" possibilities, so that you can play notes on the fret board with the right (or right+left) hand by tapping instead of strumming. An electrical-expert friend of mine brainstormed with me to figure out the best way to accomplish this. He came up with clever ideas using diodes, transistors, or-gates, etc. But it was a bit beyond my capabilities, so I went with a more basic approach and he said "yah, that'll work too" :-)
(Click on any thumbnail to get a larger version.)
The opened X-plorer controller, with my homemade switches next to it:
Close up of the switches. I used #6 brass machine screws and wedge-shaped cut pieces of aluminum siding. Each mini "sheet" is screwed onto the board, and when pressed down, contacts another screw to complete a circuit. Note there are 5 groups of 4 switches. Each quad is for a finger-tap button. Half of the quad is two switches, one for the fret button, one for the strum. I have another pair because I had some old light switches that I figured I could use to give the option of being able to tap from either side. A bonus feature that I don't actually care for, or use:
This is what it looks like underneath with the wiring in place. Also you can see the five lock nuts and rubber grommets that hold the face plate of each button on from the other side. The rubber grommets give the buttons their spring:
Here's the finished product, before attaching to the X-plorer:
After attaching to the X-plorer and feeding the wires through to eventually connect to the controller's existing circuits:
I cut into the fret button ribbon and soldered in my new wires. I used a multimeter to figure out how the wiring worked (it's kinda wacky: 8 wires for 5 fret buttons). I also soldered more of my wires to the strum board:
I didn't have any electrical tape handy, so I used duct tape. I organized the wiring a bit:
Finished product, ready to play, and very home-grown looking, very ugly, buttons aren't quite spaced out evenly, etc. But hey, it does the job:
If I had to do it again (took me a 3-day weekend, not something I wanna do again anytime soon), I'd buy a 2nd X-plorer, steal the fret buttons from it, dremmel out 5 new holes in the existing neck to install 5 more properly-colored buttons, to get the right look (and feel!) to the existing fret buttons.
I hope somebody might find something interesting in all of this. But if not... I'm just happy that I can beat Jordan!
Wiring Details
The weirdest part is that there are 5 fret buttons (each with two wires) and only 8 leads to attach them to from the main board. Here is a diagram for how to map the 10 fret wires to the 8 wires in the "ribbon" cable inside the controller:
What you do is cut the ribbon cable somewhere along the middle (see about where I did it in the above snapshots). Before you do this, though, if you have an all-white ribbon like I do, you will lose track of which is lead 1 and which is lead 8. So take a marker and mark the ribbon along lead 1. Just make a little line segment, then that's where you cut the ribbon. Then if you lose track of each side of the ribbon you just cut, you can match it back up with the mark you made to get back on track.
In the diagram above on the left you have the main board. You will notice printed right on the board a box around lead 1. I've drawn that same box in the figure here. So you cut the ribbon and strip back some of the (really thin) insulation (also the wires inside are really thin so be careful and go slow). You do that to both halves of the ribbon you cut, because you're eventually going to solder them back into each other.
So, let's take the Green fret button, labeled G above. You will solder one of the wires from that button to lead 1, and the other to lead 8. Similarly you can see which leads to attach the other 4 buttons to. What I did was do one lead at a time. So take the first lead of G, twist it up with both halves of lead 1 from the ribbon, then solder that to make a little metal "solder rod". Then you can tape that with electrical tape so that new hunk of metal you just made won't make any electrical contact with any other lead. That takes care of lead 1. Now you do that 7 more times, taking just the right wires from the fret buttons as outlined in the above diagram. Notice for lead 1 you have two fret wires coming together there. Likewise for lead 3.
The strum wiring is pretty easy in comparison. You just solder the two leads from the fret switches (all the many fret switches get combined into just two wires elsewhere) right to the back of the strum circuit board in the controller. You can see it in one of the snapshots above.
