A few months ago, a buddy and I were playing GH: World Tour.  He was shredding on the guitar, I was beating the drums.  After about an hour of playing, I noticed I was not getting score multipliers.  I'd get a few notes in and miss one.  I thought maybe I was tired, but then I noticed the red pad was becoming less and less responsive.  Went into the studio on Guitar Hero and was doing some trouble shooting until the drumhead died.  Warranty on the drums: 90 days.  I have had them for 7 months.

I did some digging around  on Google and found I'm not the only person with this problem.  So last week I figured I could either buy a new set (in all actuality I had no intention of that) or open them and try to repair them.  I opened them and found a wire was loose inside.  Today I went to my dad's place where he has every tool you could imagine and repaired them.  You could possibly use this guide to repair progressingly deaf cymbals or even a kicker pedal - they all use the same mechanism to work, it's just a matter of getting to them.  Here's how you can do it.

For starters, you'll need the following: a Phillips screwdriver, solder, soldering iron, and wire cutters.

In my dad's shop, in the boonies, there are mosquitos.  So you might want to be packing some heat:

Ok, here is your basic Guitar Hero drumset stripped down.  I removed the cymbals, kicker pedal, stand.  You just have the three drum heads and the button controls at the top.

Flip it over.  There are a bunch of screws.  Note the three at the top I circled.  Start with them, in no particular order.  You'll see why next.

As you can see, these screws old in the control buttons and a housing at the top.  This is actually the core of the controller.  It's attached with a wiring harness (the black thing) you can easily disconnect.

Set the controller and the screws aside.  Keep the screws you took out separate from the rest you're about to remove as they're threaded differently.

Remove the rest of the screws.  I didn't count them, but there's a bunch of them.  Once you remove the rest, the drumhead housing should come apart pretty easily.

Here's the inside.  Each drumhead is attached to and drives a diaphragm.  The diaphragms are attached to the controller via a postive and a ground.  It's pretty similar to a microphone.

Taking a close up of the damage.  You can see where I rigged it up with Transpore tape as a proof of concept.  This may work for you, but then it's tape and will probably come apart with some beating.  The white gobs are some sort of adhesive holding the wires to the diaphragm.  Notice there is a gold outer-ring and a dusky-looking inner-circle.  They are separated by an insulator.  The outer-ring is the positive, the inner-circle is the ground.  Keep this in mind for later.

Let's break out the soldering iron.  If you've never used one, you should know you're melting a metal with a relatively low melting point (it's still pretty damn hot) with a hot iron.  When I learned to do this, I was told it was similar to welding but much more boring.  My point: be really careful handling a hot soldering iron.  Learning to solder isn't too particularly hard, but it takes some practice and then some finesse in this application.  Behold my mighty butane-powered soldering iron - accept no damn immitations!

I did sort of a transfer of solder here: melting some solder onto the tip of the iron, then brushing it onto the wiring.  Remember the speech above about the positive and ground areas of the diaphragm?  It's very important not to cross the wiring from one area to another.  This will cause a short and the drumhead will not work.

I did the same to the ground wire, but soldered it to the inner-circle of the diaphragm.  Since the surface you're soldering to is smooth, the solder won't have much to grip on to.  So I recommend using liquid electrical tape or rubber cement to hold it down.  You can buy it at any hardware store.  It costs a few bucks and you have to be over 18 since apparently kids huff the shit (but not adults!).

Here is the finished product.  The liquid electrical tape will take about 20-25 minutes to dry enough to put the drums back together.  You could wait longer for it to cure, but that's less time playing.