Bass
The Bass is pretty nice. It's big though. Much bigger than any plastic instrument so far. Probably around 85-90% the size of a real one. It's comfortable to hold and the strap is a nicer material that's oh so wonderfully soft. It looks cool too. They did a great job of designing it.
The double strum bar is a cool concept, but I've found that doing fast alternations doesn't seem to register. I went into practice mode and in a section with repeating notes of the same color that come at a fast rate, it doesn't seem to work. For most normal sections it's slow enough that it works fine, but those really fast sections it just doesn't work. This sucks because that's the main reason I got it. I wanted to nail those really fast sections using only upstrums, and it seems I can't really do that.
Forget whammying to its full potential. There's a knob you can twist that works as a whammy bar, but unless it's a pretty long sustained note, you're not going to use it at all, and even then you wont be whammying as much as possible since you have to move your hand off of the strum bar to reach it.
I do really like that the effects toggle is a knob, not a switch. It never gets accidentally moved. Start/Select is simply twisting a knob counter clockwise for select, and clockwise for start. Kinda nifty. Also, there's a nice thumb rest for upstrumming. It's not wireless, but hey, it's still good.
If you play for fun, definitely use the bass. If you play for score, avoid it. Price $69.99.
Guitar
The new guitar is definitely an improvement. It's the same size and feel as the last one. The strum bar isn't as mushy and feels a lot better. The buttons are definitely quieter. The fact that it's wireless is really handy. It looks awesome. The auto-calibration is really easy to do and it works perfectly. My calibration was a tad off and I was doing poorly on easy songs. Now I can breeze through them like I should.
The guitar is nice and an improvement. I recommend it highly. Price $69.99.
Drums
The drums are awesome, but not without their faults.
The pads are rubbery now. This provides two benefits. One, they're a lot quieter than the old ones. Still a tad noisy, but not nearly as bad. Two, they get much better bounce. This alone has improved my scores. It feels much more natural to play. The pedal is now metal and thus should prevent it from breaking. We'll see about that, but I have faith it will hold together. The pedal also seems a tad more responsive. They're also wireless, which is awesome.
However, the structure of the drums seems of a lower quality. My set seems to wobble around a little bit more. As if it's not firmly holding itself together. I double and triple checked to make sure all the poles were firmly inserted in their slots, and still it just seems a little bit flimsy.
Then there's the issue of it being defective. I have a problem known as crosstalking. When I hit the yellow pad, it registers a hit on the blue pad. After some use and breaking-in on freeplay, the problem got a little bit better. But still persisted. The solution I found was to tape down the pads with duct tape. This eliminated the problem 99 times out of 100 which still can mess me up during songs. I'm not willing to pop my pads off. I tried, but I was not willing to apply any more force than I already had been. I do not want to void my RMA.
Assuming you have a perfectly working set, I cannot recommend the Rock Band 2 drums enough. The Ion kit is probably better, but the RB2 drums are leaps and bounds above the RB1 drums. Price $79.99.
If you're looking to get the game and the instruments, you can get the full bundle on October 19th for $189.99. This includes the game itself, the guitar, the drums, and a microphone. The bass is a 3rd party instrument that has been licensed by Harmonix for use in Rock Band. As a side note, if you prefer Guitar Hero, every one of these instruments will work with Guitar Hero World Tour.
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