ION Drum Rocker IED07 Review
So my wonderful wife got me a set of ION Drum Rocker electronic drum pads for the XBOX (for use with Rock Band).
ION is a company that makes music equipment, and has this set of electronic drum pads – and swapped out the module that would convert the hits into sounds for an amp for an XBOX/PS3 controller.
The difference is amazing.
The pads are crazy sensitive, so you don’t have to hit them so hard (vs the stock Rock Band 2 drums, where if you put silencer pads on, the extra 10% harder you have to hit wears you out and causes you to miss a few beats if you don’t hit hard enough).
Note: I play Rock Band 3 and the game works 100%.
It’s also very configurable, so you can arrange the pads side by side or in a square like an oven top (or anything in between), angle the pads at various angles, the frame itself adjusts by swiveling into various positions. So you can really customize it to your preference. Took about 45 minutes to assemble it.
In reviews people rip on the pedal – but I think they’re a **huge** improvement over the stock pedal. With the stock pedal I can’t keep up with the fast double hits (let alone the triple) for long, the resistance is way too high. But with the ION one on the first round I unleashed some Dave Grohl action on myself by way of hard level Foo Fighters and got the double beats no problem.
I was thinking of needing to also get something like the Omega / Destroyer / Rock Pedal to fully complete my set after reading what people were writing about the ION pedal. Which I might still do at some point as there is room for improvement. But going from the stock pedal to the ION pedal is like going from a Honda Fit to a BMW 328i which is a significant jump. And going to a Omega / Destroyer / Rock Pedal is like upgrading to a BMW M3, which is still a big jump, but not as drastic.
What’s also neat is you can unplug the XBOX controller module, and plug in the regular drum module (aka the Alesis DM6) and hook it up to an amp, headphones, or computer.
