Rock Band guitar mod

Yet another Rock Band post! I've mostly been playing the drums on Rock Band since I got it (the reason I bought the game, actually), but since I finished the solo tour mode on hard difficulty recently, and expert is still a bit out of reach, I've been playing through the solo tour on guitar (hard) recently. I started experiencing the much-discussed missed strum issue recently, so today I decided to take matters into my own hands. I really love the feel and design of the rock band guitar (more so than the guitar hero guitar), but the strum bar is really poorly designed, and very prone to failure. So I went and picked up some microswitches, and installed them in place of the "leaf contacts" that the guitar comes with. It required a little filing of the strum bar, but I was able to get it working using the same mounting holes that the leaf contacts used, which made the entire mod about an hour project. here are a few pics...






as you can see, I had to cut a small window in to the battery case (which isn't used on the 360 anyway), but the microswitch does not intrude into the case itself, so I think this mod would work on a wireless PS3 guitar as well, as long as the area surrounding the strum bar is similar to the Xbox360 guitar. Mind you this was all done on a "first gen" guitar, which I suppose is no longer available...

I also added some self-adhesive foam under the tabs on the strum bar to give it some more strength (reducing the "guishy feeling"), which also create a hard stop for the strummer, so it won't push too far toward the micro switches. The switches give a very satisfying "clicky" feel to the strum bar, similar to the guitar hero guitars.