School of Rock: free Guitar Hero strategy guide

Here's what I posted on the official forums about the broken whammy bar issue:

For those of you who are returning your guitars to fix the issue with an unresponsive whammy bar, you very well might be returning a fully functional guitar. There is a bug in the game that Red Octane could easily patch to fix the issue.

Here's what I've discovered...

I too have a whammy bar that was unresponsive about 60% of the time. In frustration, I plugged it into my PC to see what exactly is going on. In the control panel, under the game controllers section, you can see the raw information that the controller is sending to Windows. My whammy bar showed a full range of motion, no problems at all.

In Guitar Hero, in order to get my whammy bar to work, I just have to pull up on the whammy bar before pressing down on it... this works 100% of the time for me. The problem stems from what the game detects as the starting position of the whammy bar. Unfortunately, it's coded to only accept a whammy if the bar is in it's topmost position (100%.) An easy fix for Red Octane would be to adjust that amount to around 75%.

So, if you think you have a broken guitar, plug it into your Windows-based PC and see what Windows says about the guitar. If you have a full range of motion, DO NOT RETURN YOUR GUITAR. I am certain that Red Octane will patch this issue as soon as possible.

Mine works great, in game and on windows. Has the cord/effects on bottom. Maybe they need to try on a loooooooooooooooooooong note.

I just checked out this guide. I thought it might be a bit more in-depth than that. Most info there is stuff that can be picked up on your own with a few hours of playing. There's no advanced info for getting better scores on the hardest difficulty.

I've got the guiter with the unresponsive whammy bar. I was wondering why it wasn't responding to some of the long notes and it's a real nuisance. If it is due to the games sensitivity of the whammy bar the simple way to fix this is to add an option to the options screen to allow you to calibrate the whammy bar before you start, like the screen delay calibration option.