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So I was pretty late to the Guitar Hero game.
I didn't really start playing until 2018, which is several years after the last game was released.
For the most part, the community has stepped in with Clone Hero -- a well-made remake for PC that is mostly what I've been playing.
I'm no expert MLG player or anything, but I do think it's a lot of fun, especially with friends.
It's common knowledge that if you're going to play Guitar Hero or anything of the sort,
you need a real guitar controller.
If you try to play with like a regular game pad, it's an absolute mess.
But since it's been so long since the last game, the controllers are becoming increasingly rare.
Working guitars are expensive and good quality working guitars are even more expensive.
This one is the Gibson Les Paul
It's considered one of the better ones. The buttons are pretty good.
The strummer is pretty good.
Nice satisfying click like a good mechanical keyboard.
However, the Gibson Les Paul Guitar Hero controller-- yeah, I have to say it all every time
has a design flaw.
Let me just remove the neck.
The way these connect is
not wonderful.
Let me try to show you what I'm talking about.
In here, get a flashlight in there.
On the guitar side, we have a bunch of pogo pins. These are basically pins on springs. You can push them down and they'll push back.
On the neck side, we have these, just these conductive pads that the pogo pins jam themselves into.
Now, if you're thinking to yourself, "That seems like a pretty crude way of making a connection. I bet that's not very reliable."
You're right. It isn't.
Compared to a real plug, you get very little surface area to conduct current through.
I guess a real plug probably would have cost two more cents or something.
With strong enough pins, sure, it should work. But if the Springs aren't strong enough, either due to age, poor design or weak materials,
there just aren't enough forces involved to make a good connection and that's what happens with this controller.
The result being dropped frets -- that is fret buttons that simply don't work.
Because each button has its own pin and some pins will deteriorate faster than others, it can vary which buttons will fail at what time.
if you don't mind kind of pushing them together a little bit with your two hands
or at least with this hand and the rest of your body,
put a little bit more pressure on those pogo pins because they aren't giving enough themselves.
You can sort of make it work.
Now, I have seen some fixes for this online. For some people it's as simple as cleaning or polishing the contacts.
Others try to increase the pressure by inserting a shim of some kind.
But I've got something a little bit better.
And to show you, let's go ahead and open both of these up.
You know what's always great about secondhand electronics? It's the smell of someone else's house.
What is that? Laundry detergent? Perfume?
Release the Kraken and such.
So you can see the construction of this thing is actually pretty simple.
There are actually no electronic components to speak of, just a PCB with button pads and a ribbon cable, really.
Down here and oh my god, who [censored] in the guitar?
I mean, it's probably just flux or something but also, why is it so brown?
It could actually be some sort of hot glue trying to like secure these pieces in.
But honestly, even if it isn't [censored], this thing is pretty dirty overall.
It's probably good to be taking this part anyway just for a chance to clean it all out.
Okay. Let's open the guitar.
There's like bits of dirt coming out.
So I think all the screws are--
Oh.. [laughs] Of course.
Et tu Guitar Hero? It's a warranty sticker covering the last screw.
I don't care. I'm just gonna pull it off.
Whatever, bro. Void deez nuts.
Alright.
Let's crack it open.
Okay.
So, a few things have fallen out and I'm not sure where they came from.
What the hell is this ladder?
Weird. They-- oh, what on Earth?
This is the battery terminal.
This is the other side. It's got a capacitor, which I'm going to guess is to just kind of smooth the current from the battery.
But they covered it with that same brown goop. And of course, when I see brown goop near capacitors, I'm thinking, "Well,
bulging capacitor." but then I remembered that this goop is just kind of everywhere.
But then I'm looking at the capacitor and I'm like, "Actually, I think that is bulging a little bit."
Yeah, I definitely think.
I mean, I wasn't expecting to have to replace a cap in here, but
it's looking that way. That's getting a little bit thick for my taste.
Also, what the hell is in here?
This is where the neck comes in, clearly.
I'm guessing that's some kind of food, some kind of [censored] in there. [censored] disgusting, bro.
Anyway, this is what we're here for. These are the problematic pogo pins. You can barely get kind of an idea how they work.
Now, one way to solve this would be to just hardwire them.
There's probably even enough ribbon cable to just solder them directly together, if you don't care about being able to remove the neck anymore.
But I want to do this properly, so what can we replace this with that'll actually work properly.
Now, as you can see, there are eight pins that need to be connected between the neck and the guitar.
Because I'm an overachiever, I thought, "Well, why not choose a connector with nine?"
That's right. It's our good friend, DB9. If you have you used computers in the '90s, if you've ever plugged a computer mouse that look like this,
you know what I'm talking about.
They actually had a lot of uses back then and still do to this day, but for the most part, it's been supplanted by USB.
especially because a COM port can even run on USB nowadays for the things that do still need it.
So while you don't see these on computers as much anymore, they have been a standard plug for many, many, many years.
And check this out. Of course, as you can tell, they have at least eight pins,
but also, it actually coincidentally is about the same size.
So effectively, by using DB9 -- this connector that actually [censored] works,
we can make a decent, solid connection between the neck and the rest of the guitar.
We don't have to sacrifice the ability to remove the neck and we don't get any more dropped frets anymore.
Should be good and completely fix the issue.
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And now, back to the Guitar Hero controller.
Now, there is one issue with the DB9 connectors that I'm sure some of you have noticed.
The DB9 connector has all this metal bracket around it because it's designed to be screwed in
and that doesn't quite fit in there.
So let's go ahead and try to trim this down. I have my cutting pliers.
Let's see what happens. Hopefully I don't lose an eyeball.
Oh, dear. It's quite strong.
Last time I think I used like a saw or something.
Okay. You can see what I'm doing here. I used the cutting pliers to score it
and I'm using the pliers to just kind of twist it off.
And it's off.
And they are trimmed down.
Same for the other part.
No one told me I was gonna get a workout today.
Oh, nothing. I'm just trimming down my DB9 connectors.
Now, I should mention that by cutting off the ends, we've cut off the parts that stick the brackets together, but
don't worry, I have a trick for this that I'll show off later in the video.
Alright. Let's do a test fit.
Alright. So now, you can kind of see where I'm going for here -- turning the neck into an actual real plug.
But before we go any further, I think I'm gonna clean all these.
We're going to start getting into the nitty gritty of it and I don't wanna have to be touching any of this crap for much longer.
Okay. So I've gone ahead and cleaned all the parts. They're currently drying.
While we're waiting for that, let's go ahead and do some soldering.
So it's all pretty straightforward. Just removing these small boards and replacing them with plugs.
For the neck. I thought the ribbon cable might be a little hard to wire to the plug, so I replaced it with my own wiring.
But for the body, I couldn't remove the cable, so I ended up just using it and it wasn't so bad.
The only potential complication is having to keep an eye on which pins are which, and not getting confused about one plug being a mirror of the other
-- which I did, but I eventually figured it all out.
Okay.
After a lot of concentrating, probably like 45 minutes of saying absolutely nothing,
we have arrived at
I think a functional plug.
I guess the only way to know will be to put it back together and test it out.
Here's our first much, much cleaner part.
Let's go ahead and start putting these pieces back in, shall we?
While I usually encourage disassembling things to clean every part individually,
I almost wouldn't recommend it here because the construction of this guitar is surprisingly complicated.
A lot of really small pieces and screw variations make it quite an elaborate reassembly.
No wonder these things are rare nowadays.
If I'm struggling just to put one together, how would the Taiwanese children who had to build these all day feel?
Okay. Now this is a potential gotcha with doing this.
There are a screw holes all along the center so you wanna make sure that you route your wires
so they don't get screwed into when you put it back together.
There's one particularly close to the plug we're installing, but since I'm using thin wires, there's just enough space to get around them.
If I was smarter, I would reattach that middle wire to this one over here
because we have a spare pin.
I'm gonna not 'cause I'm lazy.
Alright. So here's my trick for sticking the metal brackets back together on their ports --
Just solder along the sides. With plenty of flux, of course, it'll essentially function as metal glue.
For the male side, since there's nothing to align the pieces together, just plug it in and
that'll keep everything in the right place while you solder it together.
Simple but very effective.
So there are these little, like things here to hold the original piece in place, but they're
preventing this from sitting flush so much. Just snip them off.
Alright. Eyes closed.
There we go.
Okay. So I'm just about to close this thing up and give it a decent test.
Don't think I've forgotten about this capacitor. I will replace it, but
maybe not in this video 'cause to get another one, I'm probably gonna have to order it online and it's going to take a few days.
You all know what replacing a capacitor looks like. I have several videos of doing so on this channel.
I am gonna replace it because I don't like the look of that bulge
which is also what I say during Labyrinth.
But I may end up doing that off camera.
And close it all up.
You can see got a DB9 in there.
And each plug should connect
just by sliding in the neck.
Excellent. I have a gamepad controller tests application up
and all five buttons seem to be working well.
But for the ultimate test, of course, I'll have to open up Clone Hero.
Now, I can play all the best music and I ain't talking DJ Khaled.
Aha! Yeah. Looking good.
Now, I hate to say it, but I won't be able to actually play any of this music on YouTube, because
the record labels will strike me down with great vengeance and furious anger.
In fact, even I can't hear the songs now because I don't want the music to bleed into the microphone, so
that makes this quite a challenging gameplay experience.
But I am pleased to report not a single dropped fret,
at least not one that isn't my fault. [chuckles]
But I have to say I'm pretty happy with this.
I mean, I knew this would work 'cause I've done this before on a friend's Guitar Hero controller.
So as far as I'm concerned, this was kind of a proven fix
but I kind of love how elegant it is.
I love that these COM ports work just by plopping the neck in
just like the pogo pins did, but with infinitely more reliability.
So, I'm calling this done.
Anyways, thank you so much for watching this video and I hope you enjoyed it.
I hope you found this as cool as I did.
Maybe this is even helpful if you have one of these controllers. I mean, it definitely takes some effort, but I very much stand by the results.
Anyways, have a great rest of your day and I'll see you all in the next one.
Bye guys.
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