How do I get the hi-hat to the right place in RB3 Pro drum kit?

Question

Is there any way to set up the RB3 drum kit + cymbals so that the hi-hat (yellow cymbal) is straight above the snare? It would be nice to be able to use either hand for the snare while playing running sixteenth notes on the hi-hat. Actually, failing that, I'd really rather have the hi-hat to the left of the snare so I can play the snare with my right hand.

Harmonix seems to have been aware of this issue when charting basic drums; on songs where it comes up, they chart hi-hat as red and snare as yellow. It seems strange that they'd ignore it for Pro Drums.

Answer 1

Following the advice in this review and Grasa's comment below, I was able to set it up like this:

This is as far left as I could get hi-hat. Note that this does not require you to pull apart any of the clamps, so you are free to experiment without incredible pain, and if you decide you don't like it, you can just put it back together the way it was.

How I did it:

• Remove all the cymbals from their clamps. This will also give you the clamp that was previously keeping the blue- and green-cymbals stable.
• Move the green cymbal to the long pole, and the blue cymbal to one of the shorter poles.
• Place the green cymbal where the yellow cymbal was, and turn its clamp more to the left.
• Attach the yellow cymbal to green's pole using the clamp you removed from between the blue- and green-cymbals. You'll need to fidgit with the rotations on the clamps holding the yellow/green cymbals to get the yellow to a comfortable position.
• You can place the blue cymbal back where it was.

Note that, yes, the green and blue cymbals are intentionally swapped from where you'd think they would be. This is because in Rock Band 3, the green cymbal is almost always the crash, while the blue cymbal is the ride, and most drum sets have the crash on the left and the ride on the right. This can make the game very difficult to play, and I'm seriously considering I have since swapped the green- and blue-cymbals back again.

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View from behind the right-side:

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View from behind the left-side:

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View from in front of left-side:

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Hope this helps!

Answer 2

I found a way to move my hi-hat farther left without having to move either blue or green over to the left-hand side (which was driving me crazy). However, this will only work if you have an extra RB drum kit around to cannibalize. (Since the pieces of my RB1 kit turned out to be compatible, I assume an RB2 kit would be, but I don't know.)

I removed the long clamp from between the blue and green cymbals. Then I took the yellow cymbal and its pole out of their clamp, replacing that pole with one leg (both the post and the foot) of my old RB1 drums. Finally, using the long clamp, I attached the yellow cymbal and its pole sticking out to the left of the RB1 pole.

Here's the back of the left-hand side; the yellow cymbal is just above the picture frame. Note the two 'nested' feet at the bottom.

Here's the back of the right-hand side. At first it was unchanged except for the removal of the cross-brace clamp; then I realized I could use the other leg of my old drums to stabilize the post of the green cymbal, which was wobbling without the cross-brace:

There's nothing attaching the green cymbal's post to the leg; I just adjusted the extra leg's height to sliiiightly higher than the bottom of the green post, so that when I nestled the base of the green post into the open upper end of the extra leg, the extra leg would take some of the weight.

Here's a drummer's-eye view of the result: