It's official: the Expert Bass Drum glitch in Guitar Hero 5 will not be patched or fixed.  Drummers will have to either play Hard skill or move up to the brutal Expert+ skill level if they want to avoid the game's bug.

An official post by Guitar Hero developers Neversoft on the GuitarHero.com support forum states:

by Neversoft » Fri Jan 15, 2010 11:12 pm
I have an official statement I can now post about the Expert+ drum glitch:

"Thanks for all the information on the expert+ issue. Unfortunately, it's not something that we will be patching for currently released products. However, we are currently working on solution for future Guitar Hero games."

Thanks,
Neversoft

In reality, Neversoft has actually fixed this problem several months ago, since Band Hero came out in late 2009 containing a fixed Expert skill level.  Thanks to Band Hero's song importing feature, players were able to test the same songs on both GH5 and Band Hero for a back-to-back Expert drum comparison, and in every case, players agreed that songs glitched in GH5 were fixed when imported into Band Hero.

Unsurprisingly, the company's recent decision not to correct the game's malfunction has caused a furor to erupt among Expert Guitar Hero drummers.

This is not the first major Guitar Hero malfunction that Activision/Neversoft have refused to correct

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Expert drummers discover a flaw in GH5 songs with Expert+ drum charts that causes players to completely fail songs they would normally ace.  5Frets.com investigates the details and talks with Expert players offering workarounds.

Shortly after Guitar Hero 5 was released, expert drummers found themselves failing songs during passages with heavy bass pedal action for no good reason.  Even in DLC songs imported from Guitar Hero World Tour, players found themselves suddenly failing songs they were able to pass with no trouble in GHWT.

The Facts: something is broken in certain Guitar Hero 5 Expert Drum Charts, and the company fixed it in Band Hero

Here are the facts that nobody disputes:

• The glitch happens only in Guitar Hero 5
• The glitch happens only on songs that have the Expert+ drum skill level
• The glitch happens only when the player is playing the Expert skill of a song that also features Expert+
• The glitch happens to both GH5 on-disc songs (see link for list of the 9 Expert+ tracks), as well as DLC and disc imports like World Tour and Smash Hits (particularly the free Metal Track Pack DLC)
• The glitch affects all platforms: Xbox 360, PS2 & PS3, and Nintendo Wii,
• The company fixed this problem in Band Hero

UPDATE: January 16th, 2010: Official statement says the GH5 expert drum glitch will not be patched or corrected

See article: Guitar Hero 5 Expert Drum Glitch Will Never Be Fixed.

The Cause of the GH5 Expert Drum Glitch

There is debate among players over what causes the glitch.  Two theories are popular:

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Have your Guitar Hero World Tour DLC songs disappeared after playing Guitar Hero 5?  Every time you play GH5, it breaks your GHWT SD Card DLC, so next time you load GHWT, you'll get the error message pictured above, which reads:

ERROR: Add-on Content on the SD Card cannot be listed due to a missing or out of date content catalog.  To restore SD Card functionality, please redownload content in the music Store or restore content in the Archive.

It sounds bad, but it's really a 30 second fix.

Just open up the Music Store from the Guitar Hero World Tour main menu, and click the orange Archive button:

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Guitar Hero 5 froze my Nintendo Wii solid; I had to cold reset it to recover.

I only had the game for 2 hours and was simply browsing between the very 1st and 2nd song in the Career setlist, when the game suddenly froze cold in the video you see below.  Unbelievable!  Activision quality control department: This is your wake up call.

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It's tough enough to earn a good score playing Guitar Hero World Tour.  But for drummers on Nintendo Wii, hitting the notes correctly might earn you a worse score than missing them. How can that be?

According to the #1 drummer on Wii Guitar Hero World Tour (ranked by overall career drum score as of 08/31/09 on the official GuitarHero.com Leaderboards), "Koric" claims that a bug in the drum rolls (long notes) sometimes causes the score to drop upon completing the roll.

Indeed, he has posted a video on YouTube proving this is exactly the case.  Watch as he plays "Sweet Home Alabama" and his score goes in reverse by 5400 points.  Start around the 6:00 mark, he goes into a drum roll and finishes with 580K, but after the note ends, the score reverses to 578K.  Then he does another drum roll and finishes at 582K only for it to reverse again and drop back to 577K, shortchanging him by at least 7500 points:

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