Mastering Guitar Hero World Tour Drum Star Power Activation

Guitar Hero World Tour is known to have finicky and difficult Star Power activation on drums. Most drummers have experienced it: you hit the yellow & orange cymbals simultaneously to activate Star Power, and instead you get a dull thud and break your streak. Why is this, and what can you do about it?

Worldwide 1st place (career score) Guitar Hero World Tour Wii drummer "Koric" shared with 5Frets.com his excellent tips for mastering the tricky GHWT drum SP activations:

To activate star power on GHWT drums:

99% of the time I do it when there is (at least) a yellow or orange note.

In this case though, you HAVE to hit the non-charted note first.

For example you are activating on top of a yellow note.. you gotta hit the orange cymbal a few miliseconds before hitting the yellow one, or it will break your combo. You can't hit it too early either, or it will think you were just trying to hit orange and then yellow, instead of activating star power.

I said "at least" (there is a yellow or orange note), because I often squeeze other notes, such as in activating on a red+yellow, but that is a little bit more advanced as it requires you to hit 3 pads virtually at the same time, but specifically in the correct order. (for instance, in the red+yellow case you have to hit orange followed by yellow followed by red, all within a tenth of a second)

I rarely ever activate in between notes, and I only activate on non-yellow/orange notes if I have no other choice (say a single green or a single red), as it also requires hitting 3 pads to be able to take credit for the note.

And one last note: it is completely impossible to activate star power on or before a yellow+orange note. It doesn't matter how far away it is, if the next note is a orange+yellow, you CAN'T activate star power, except for rare occasions online where it just lags and activates without you even wanting it to, you just hit the note and it activates.  So avoid those.

There you go, I guess that is about every single detail there is to know about GHWT drums star power. And I myself still get my combo broken every now and then when activating.

Good luck!

Koric is also currently #1 for Guitar Hero Smash Hits Wii drum career score, and says he's got about 60 GHWT drum FCs to his credit.

Thank you, Koric for sharing your GHWT drum star power techniques with us!  (This is the same Koric who discovered that Bug in Guitar Hero World Tour causes score to roll backwards for Wii drummers.)

Important Note: Guitar Hero World Tour is the only game to have this unusually difficult drum star power activation.  This behavior was corrected and made a great deal more simple, starting with Guitar Hero Metallica (and carrying into Smash Hits and Guitar Hero 5).