Desperate to take a break from reporting news about the Nintendo Media Summit, Multiplayer brings you two “Rock Band” posts back-to-back today. The focus is: drumming.

As many “Guitar Hero” enthusiasts have learned (myself included), being able to push buttons quickly on a fake plastic guitar will not make you an instant six-string virtuoso.

However, it’s been suggested that if you are able to play the drums on hard or expert in “Rock Band,” you’ll be able to play the real drums.

MTV Multiplayer put this theory to the test. When pop-rock outfit Cartel came into the MTV studios, we had them try out “Rock Band” to see what they thought. The band got to play a few rounds of Bon Jovi’s “Dead or Alive” and David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” (with each band member playing the instruments they play in real life). They failed at first, but then got progressively better in their 45 minutes with the game (they even began switching parts).

Afterwards, I caught up with drummer Kevin Sanders and guitarist Joseph Pepper to talk about their thoughts on the “Rock Band” drum kit. I wanted to know just how real the “Rock Band” drumming felt.

[Full disclosure: "Rock Band" is published by MTV Games]

A drummer for over 10 years, Sanders failed “Dead or Alive” on medium difficulty. Then he tried the song on expert; he did much better and passed the song. “It’s kind of like ‘Guitar Hero’ where you don’t really know what you’re doing at first,” he said. He also thought playing the “Rock Band” drum kit was more authentic to real drumming when it was played on expert mode. “The easier [the song is in the game], it takes away what’s actually in the song,” he explained. “But if you actually know how the drums go in your head and you’re reading the notes [on the screen], it doesn’t really make sense in the tune. I guess the harder [the difficulty] is, the more real the song is [to actually playing it].”

Pepper agreed, and he doesn’t even play the drums. “I don’t really have the coordination to do it. I get the concept of it, but put me behind a drum set and I get really awkward,” he claimed. But when the guitarist got behind the “Rock Band” kit, he performed surprisingly well, getting through songs on expert difficulty. “As Kevin was saying, if you do the expert mode, it’s actually more like a drum set,” he said. “When you hear the sounds, you can mimic all the different beats, but you put it on an easier mode and there might be more bass drum going on than what you’re playing [in the game].”

“But what’s hard for Kevin on the drums is what’s hard for me on the guitar,” Pepper added. “There’s only five buttons on this guitar, where on the real guitar there’s tons of frets. So you have to really pay attention to where all the dots are going and what you’re supposed to be playing than how the song [actually goes].”

With Sanders having no problems playing the “Rock Band” drums due to being a real-life drummer (he even used the southpaw option to accommodate his left-handedness), he’d love to have the game just for bragging rights. “I want this game in my house just so I can have my friends come over and embarrass themselves, and I be can like, ‘Hey, it’s not as easy as it looks, is it? That’s right.’”

As for Pepper, I asked the guitarist if he thought he could play the real drums after playing “Rock Band” that day. “Oh, no way,” he said. “A couple of years of playing on this, and then maybe I’ll graduate to a real drum set… But I think it’s easy enough for anybody to get behind this and just have fun playing it.”