Disable a button on an Xbox controller on Windows?

So, here's my use case - I own a Band Hero drumkit for the Xbox 360. It gets picked up by my Xbox 360 wireless receiver on Windows without any issues, and it's even recognised as a drum kit. So far, so good.

However, the moment I strike any of the drum heads, the controller registers a button 9 press that remains held for as long as the kit is turned on. This, as you can imagine, makes it impossible to map the pads to anything useful - everything gets mapped to that blasted button 9.

I decided to figure out what button 9 even is, and as it turns out, it's the left stick button press. The drum kit doesn't even have any thumbsticks, so I have zero idea why it's even sending out the signal.

So, here's my question: is it possible to disable that particular button through the drivers somehow? I could just buy a replacement drum brain, but those are increasingly scarce, and if there's an easy software fix, I can live with that.

Solution 1:

As long as the controller just being plugged in doesn't mess with the game, you can use software like Joy2Key or Joystick Gremlin to bind your controller to the keyboard or a virtual joystick and then have the game use that instead. Both of those programs don't care if a button is held down and will ignore it and let you set up whatever mapping you want.

If the game happens to be a Steam game, it may be possible to use Steam Input settings as well. I have used this to force games to ignore joystick input.