You may not be familiar with the company Tronical but you will know their work because they are responsible for Gibson’s Robot Guitar tuning systems. Well judging by this video it appears that Tronical are about to launch some standalone systems that can be retrofit to pretty much any guitar be it a Les Paul [...]
Category: Guitars
Guitar Sidekick – Media Device for Guitarists
A Macworld article indicates there are currently over 500 guitar-related iPhone apps.
Every up-to-speed tech geek, guitar player will want this mechanical interface.
You’re looking at the Guitar Sidekick, an accessory for mounting your iPhone, Blackberry, Droid or other similar media devices to your guitar. The above article link tells you all about it, but the picture basically says it all.
The Guitar Sidekick is available at: www.castiv.com
(Via Strat-O-Blogster Guitar Blog.)
iRig aims at guitar players with an iDevice in tow
If you’re already have a strong interest in playing the guitar and happen to own an iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone (or all three), then the iRig might make for a prudent investment. What, another purchase in these economically trying times? Well, the iRig guitar accessory from IK Multimedia alongside the accompanying AmpliTube iPad and iPhone software will help you make music in a new way. You will have to hook the iRig adapter up to an iDevice and guitar, where the output of the iRig will be connected to a pair of headphones or an amp, where you can then launch the AmpliTube software to play around with a range of effects, amps, mics, pedals, and cabinets right from the comfort of your fingertips. Layer effects and amplifier change can be done with but a touch. Meant to work with an electric guitar, it will also play nice with just about any 6-string with a decent pickup. If you’re interested in expanding your musical repertoire, the iRig can be yours for $39.99 a pop. We don’t think a professionally cut album will feature this anytime soon though, but that’s a nice thought if it happens.
(Via Ubergizmo.)
Jam With Musicians All Over The World With Youphonics
Sometimes creative minds need collaboration, and musicians are no exception. You might have come up with the perfect riff, but can’t come up with the complete song. That’s where YouPhonics comes in.
YouPhonics, currently in private beta, is an online meeting place for musicians to share snippets of music, recorded and uploaded to their free accounts. Other members can then link their own snippets, and in so doing, possibly create a virtual song. Read on if you want to find out how to get in on the private beta.
YouPhonics is a slick website, and couldn’t be easier to use. Once you’ve signed up, you can either go ahead and upload a piece of music, or stem, you would like to share with the community, or look for other stems to collaborate on.
If you want to start with a stem of your own, there are two ways to get it onto the website. You can play it while recording it directly to YouPhonics – but this requires Flash Player 10.1 to be installed. For the less daring, you can upload your piece of pre-recorded music.
The only limitations placed on uploaded files is a maximum file size of 10MB and it has to be an MP3. After you’ve added your stem, you can then name and tag it. Make sure to put the relevant tags that will help other musicians find it.
There’s no limit to the kind of creations you can upload to YouPhonics. If you have some lyrics and a melody, go ahead and upload that for others to create the music around it. If you have a guitar riff, upload, and someone else can add another instrument, and so forth.
If you’d rather find a song to collaborate on – there are a couple of ways to find the music that suits your style. The easiest way to do this is using the search function.
You can filter search results by stems, tags, and users.
If you’re not sure what to look for, you could always take a look at the recommendations and featured artists, as well as the most listened to stems, on the home page.
To add a stem to an already existing piece of music, open it up in the Sound Room. Hover over it and click the New Stem button. From there you can also give the piece of music the thumbs up, add your own tags or even download the MP3.
The magic on YouPhonics happens in the Sound Room when you play several stems at once. For example, someone has uploaded a piece of music, and someone else has attached the accompanying vocals. Play the two stems together by clicking each of them once, and they will play simultaneously.
YouPhonics is of course a social network in its own right. You can message other users, as well as become their fan. Your profile features your fans, members you are a fan of, your stems, and stems you have bookmarked, or essentially, added to your favourites. You can also include a bit of personal information such as your location, website, and a short bio.
To get in on the private beta sign up using the secret code MAKEUSEOFYOUPHONICS, which expires a week from today.
(Via MakeUseOf.com.)
How-To: Guitar effects proto pedal
Matt posted the steps he took to build a proper stompbox development platform -
Designing and building your own guitar effects is a great way to combine a passion for electronics and guitar. However, when testing new designs, I found the fragile circuit on the solderless breadboard was difficult to connect to patch cords and control the potentiometers.
The answer was simple: build a guitar pedal just for prototyping!
A thoroughly sturdy design, including a custom cut/drilled & folded aluminum enclosure with standard hole sizes for swappable pots and switches. Check out the projects instructable for details.
More:
(Via MAKE Magazine.)
3 Audacity Tips To Enhance Any Recordings
As a blogger and a researcher, I have to conduct a lot of interviews. Some months I’ve conducted two or three interviews a week, and many of those are recorded interviews, because many people don’t have time to answer questions via email. One of the nice things about recorded interviews is that they work well as an audio podcast either available for download from your own blog, or distributed as a podcast at any podcast directory.
Regardless what you intend to do with the interview, one thing that’s for certain is that you want to develop a reputation as a professional interviewer that produces high-quality, interesting conversations with fascinating people.
Only part of the recipe for this is developing interesting and thoughtful questions for your interviewee to answer, but the other significant part of the equation is how well you’ve edited the audio interview into a high-quality, professional show. Many avid audio enthusiasts may find some of the edits below somewhat simple, but for the blogger or podcaster with little audio editing experience, these tips are critical to know.
3 Tips To Enhance Your Interview Audio With Audacity
I use the Audacity audio recording software to record and edit all of my interviews. My recording setup is about as simple as it gets – an Olympic earpiece that doubles as both a microphone and an earphone, so that I can hear the person on the phone while the microphone feeds the conversation into the laptop and Audacity. This works well, and produces high quality conversations, but like anything, there are flaws in the setup that produce less than optimum conditions.
The beauty of Audacity is that you have the capability to ‘fix’ those flaws. The three most common problems that I’m going to touch on in this post are removing background noise, amplifying voices, and integrating quality introduction with music.
Before we start doctoring the audio file with the Audacity audio recording software, let me first introduce the patient. Above is a snippet of an hour-long audio interview that I conducted last month. The two most common flaws are background noise, shown in the center of this clip, and low voice volume (my voice) as shown on the right. You can see that the amplitude when I was talking is about half of that of the voice on the phone – which is to be expected when recording with such an earpiece.
How To Fix Quiet Voices
The first tweak for the common interview issue of quiet voices is also the easiest. The volume of the voice is equivalent to ‘amplitude,’ so all you have to do is use Audacity’s Amplify tool to increase the quiet voice just a little bit.
To perform this task, just highlight the section of audio track with the quiet voice, and then select ‘Amplify’ from the Effect menu option.
In the amplify tool, you’ll need to select an amplification that is just enough to increase the voice volume to a level that’s equivalent to the other person speaking. It may take some trial and error the first time, so just undo the change and try a new value until you get it right.
In my case, I found that an increase of 5 dB did the trick. Once you know the right value, the only tedious part of this fix is that you’ll need to find every place in the track where the quiet voice shows up, and do the highlight/amplify routine to fix it.
How To Remove Background Noise With Audacity
The second most common flaw in an interview audio file is background noise. Maybe you left a fan on in the other room, or there are cars going by just outside the open window, and you realize once you listen to the audio that the sound is terribly annoying and distracting.
The first step in this technique is to identify an area in your file that features nothing but the background noise alone. When you find such an area, highlight that section of the audio track, and then go into the ‘Noise Removal’ tool in the Effects menu option.
Once you’re there, click on ‘Get Noise Profile‘. Doing this captures a snapshot of the background noise itself. The software uses this to ‘erase’ that sound profile from a section (or all) of the audio file. The next step is just to highlight the area where you want to remove the noise (most of the time you’ll just select the entire track), and then go back into this window and select ‘Remove Noise‘.
As you can see, Audacity does an amazing job at cleaning up the noise. There is one caveat, and it is this – carefully gauge the amount of noise that you want to remove. Removing too little won’t do much good, and removing too much will make the audio sound over-digitized or artificially quiet. One thing I noticed is that the middle to lower middle setting is usually ideal.
Integrating A Musical Or Voice Introduction
Have you ever heard those cool podcasts with a great musical introduction? Well, believe it or not, you can do the same exact thing in Audacity in just a few simple steps. The first step, obviously, is importing the music file that you would like to use (make sure you don’t infringe on any licensing issues).
The next step is just highlight the block of music you’d like to use as your introduction (select the correct number of seconds) and then do a simple Copy. Then place the cursor at the start of your audio file, and select Paste. The copied music clip will get inserted into your track, pushing the entire interview to the right.
While this is cool, it’ll sound weird because at the end of the clip, your music will just end abruptly. Instead, you want to taper off the music as you enter into the interview itself. You can do this by highlighting the very last part of your music clip and selecting Effect -> Fade Out from the Menu.
You’ll see the amplitude of the music clip taper off as it approaches the end of the clip, and in effect producing a very nice fade into the interview itself.
By using these three simple tips, you’ve just equalized voice volume, removed background noise, and embedded a professional music introduction into your audio interview. With just these few simple changes, you’ll transform amateur sounding interviews into well produced, professional sounding conversations.
(Via MakeUseOf.com.)
5 Cool Websites With Guitar Tuning Tones
Recently, I started taking guitar lessons. One of the benefits of learning how to play the guitar is that you finally have something to do to entertain people when they visit. The downside of playing guitar is that you have to maintain the thing, which most of the time just means learning how to tune it. Luckily, there are numerous websites that offer the guitar tuning tones you need to get your guitar sounding perfect again.
In my search for the best sites, I came across some pretty simple ones and some that are fairly unique. Ultimately, the function is really simple – you press a button and the computer should play the right note for that string. What I discovered is that a majority of the sites that offer guitar tuning tones play tones that aren’t quite ‘right’ or at least they aren’t very clear.
So, if you want a quick tool to tune your guitar as quickly as possible, and you left your convenient electronic tuner at home, here are 5 awesome websites that will do the trick.
A Guitar Tuning Tone For Each String
The premise of these five sites is very simple. They just play the guitar tuning tone for that string. While the tone is playing, you just play the string and turn the tuning key until the sound of the string matches the computer tone.
The first online tool I’d like to cover is the Gieson tuner, because it appears to be the most popular. This is probably because the tool also offers an embed code where people can place the guitar tuner right on their website or blog.
The front panel is creative. The little device features the five guitar strings, but you can choose to hear the sound as a tone instead (the tone option didn’t work on my computer though.) You can manually flip each switch by clicking on it, and the sound of the guitar string for that note will repeat. When you’re done, turn off that switch and flip the next.
If you’re very fast at tuning, you can flip the ‘Auto Advance’ switch, and the device will play the sound for each string a few times before moving on to the next note automatically. This allows for hands-free operation so you can focus on tuning your guitar.
The next guitar tuner is offered by ChordBook. This well-designed guitar tuner provides a variety of options to customize the tuner depending on the type of guitar you’re working with.
There are a lot of features here. You can turn the tuning keys to adjust each note depending on how you want to tune your guitar, like turning D into D Minor, or E into E minor. Or, select one of the common alternative tunings from the list if you want to use something other than the standard. When you’re ready to tune, click on the ‘R’ next to each key and the tone for that key will repeat until you’re done.
HotFrets offers a stylish little online guitar tuner app that isn’t quite as feature-filled as the first two listed above, but it does have some entertaining animation.
Just click on each string and the note will play. Alternately, you can just press the number for that string and it’ll play as well. There aren’t any nifty features with this one, it’s just the standard tuning and what you see is what you get.
The next site with guitar tuning tones is actually one of the favorites, only because the designers used a unique style for the thing. It’s offered by Tune My Bass.
The presets tab lets you choose what type of guitar you’re tuning, such as a 5 string bass or a 7 string guitar, and custom tuning lets you choose your sound types and also save your presets to a file on your PC. When you’re ready to tune, just hover the mouse over the string and as the tone plays it also displays the note. While you’re busy tuning, the app plays all sorts of animation for you. Yes, those are underpants flying in from the right side of the screen.
The last site that I’d like to cover is aptly called Online Guitar Tuner. At this website, the first thing you’ll want to do is select the type of tuning that you require from the menu list on the right side of the main page.
In my case, I’m going to go for the Open G Tuning. Once you click on the tuner type, the next screen opens up with the strings and the tuner keys displayed graphically.
Just click on the note, and the tone plays in clear, crisp audio from your computer speakers. The only drawback with this tool is that the sound doesn’t keep playing automatically. You have to keep clicking on the button to hear the tone. If you are somewhat slow at tuning your guitar, this could become annoying – so you might want to consider using one of the online tuners above that offers a more hands-free approach.
(Via MakeUseOf.com.)
4 Awesome Websites To Find Guitar Chords For Songs
In this article, I’m going to outline some of the top resources that I use to find guitar chords for songs that I want to learn how to play. Recently, I decided that I needed a way to relax and get rid of stress – something that is somehow unconnected with the computer.
I remembered playing around with my mother’s old guitar when I was a kid, and realized that I’ve always wanted to learn how to play guitar. My daughter was already taking piano lessons from a local older couple who give lessons, so I decided to take guitar lessons while waiting for my daughter to finish her piano lessons.
Within three lessons, I found myself playing a John Denver song using just three chords. Of course, I was immediately hooked. Practicing every night, I’ve mastered the song in about a month. However, once I was able to play the one song, I wondered how many others I could learn that use just those three or four chords.
So, a hobby that I took on in order to get off of the computer and take a break from the Internet, ended up bringing me back to the Internet in search of guitar chords for songs that I really want to learn how to play. I’ve found a few excellent websites that do a tremendous job in cataloging the correct chords for the most popular traditional and contemporary songs. Today, I’d like to share those discoveries with other guitar players out there.
Chordie – A Massive Library Of Accurate & Inaccurate Chords
I think Chordie has to be one of the largest collections of guitar chords and tabs that I’ve ever found. I’ve yet to think of a song that doesn’t have a corresponding Chordie listing. At Chordie, you can search for either song or artist listings that are organized in a long alphabetical collection. This way, if you don’t know the title of a song, you can search for the guitar chords by the artist name instead.
Chordie is actually a huge community of guitar players who love music so much that they spend time trying to figure out the chords to music, and then list their findings on Chordie. Most of the time, you’ll discover that the chords listed here are actually pretty accurate – and you’ll be playing the coolest songs in no time.
If you can’t find guitar chords for songs that you’re looking for anywhere else, then I’d suggest going to Chordie as your last resort. Why as a last resort? Because at least half the time, you’ll also discover that members posted chords or lyrics that are just totally wrong.
For example, one of the first songs I tried to learn on my own was Losing My Religion, by R.E.M. I found that the chords seem correct, but the lyrics are completely messed up. Some sentences are completely wrong, and others are just plain silly. This is only representative of about a third of Chordie chord listings from members – most of them are pretty accurate. The best part of Chordie listings is that the chord is displayed at the upper right hand corner, so you don’t have to go flipping through your guitar book to remind yourself how to play an ‘F’.
Ultimate Guitar – The Ultimate Resource
Although I started out using Chordie, I got frustrated looking for accurate contemporary songs, so I was very pleased to stumble across Ultimate Guitar. The first thing you’ll notice when you arrive is that the layout is very clean and very cool. There’s music news, reviews, articles and interviews. You’ll find a forum and a full community of guitar playing music lovers just like you.
This is seriously a huge community where you can not only discover the guitar chords for songs, but you can absolutely immerse yourself into the world of music as you’re learning to play new songs.
My favorite section of the site is the Top 100, where you’ll discover some of the greatest songs that you hear on the radio and wish that you could learn how to play.
I was very happy to discover the song Hey There Delilah, by the Plain White T’s – it’s a song I really want to learn how to play. Unfortunately, this page brought the discovery that it requires both F minor and B minor – two chords I’ve yet to master yet. Maybe some day soon…
Another thing I like about this site is that in most cases you’ll find both the chords and the tabs. Many self-taught guitar players like tabs because it shows which string and which fret to play for each strum. However, taking lessons I’ve learned the chords, so really prefer just the lyrics with the chord changes listed above. Luckily, at Ultimate Guitar you’ll find both.
E-Chords – An Online Application For Learning Guitar Chords
While my favorite online sport for popular guitar chords is Ultimate Guitar, E-Chords is a very close second. I love how functional the site is. From the main page, you’ll discover that you can search for songs by artists, albums, composers, song titles and even using just part of the lyrics, which is very useful when you just can’t remember the title of a song.
This site isn’t so much as community as it is an awesome online application that helps you learn how to play any song using whatever format you’re most comfortable with. The coolest part of e-chords is how you can customize the display of the song and the associated chords with a click of the mouse.
The guitar chords for songs that you’ll find here are displayed exactly how I like them – the lyrics with the required chord listed above them. The menu bar on the left offers all kinds of cool features, including auto-scroll (really nice when you’re trying to play and need to scroll down for the lyrics!), increase or decrease the font size, hide chords, play simpler chords (if available) and even switch the chord display from the letter to the chord drawings (awesome for beginners).
Overall, I’d have to say that guitar chords for songs that I want are at e-chords, then this is where I prefer playing them because it’s so convenient and easy to use.
Heartwood Guitar Instruction – Chords For Learning Guitar
While Heartwood Guitar isn’t a giant library of thousands of guitar chords for songs, it is a place that you’ll want to go for some amazing free resources to learn how to play the guitar – with a hundred or so great classic songs, including the chords you’ll need to know to play them. Major kudos to Rob Hampton of Seattle for creating this impressive and useful online resource. To find the chords, from his main site just click on Chord Charts. You’ll find hundreds of great songs listed alphabetically.
These chord listings are nicely laid out with strum and rhythm information noted throughout in some spots. Now, while the chord listings are really fun to go through and play, I have to say that my favorite part of this website are the guitar lessons that Rob has written up and that he offers for absolutely free on his blog.
On his blog, he’ll show you tips and techniques on how to strum, tuning your guitar, fingerpicking and much more – often including images and always including detailed and clear instruction. It’s obvious that this is one instructor who is an excellent teacher, and that he really loves the art of guitar playing.
(Via MakeUseOf.com.)
Guitar slide from glass bottle
We’ve discussed numerous methods for making a cup from a glass bottle, but I don’t recall seeing anyone use the neck before. Brookelynn from CRAFT has us covered, though, with this guitar slide made from a wine bottle:
One interesting historical example of upcycled crafting is the bottleneck guitar- or as it is now widely known, slide guitar. The unique resonant sound of slide guitar was originally formed by playing with a glass bottleneck over one finger and running the slide up and down the strings. While the materials for making slides have evolved, bottles are still a popular choice of material. We were given one, and as it has been used over the years, the piece has developed some lovely scratches that give the glass beautiful character. Slideplayer.com has two great ideas for making your own, including a ‘Burning Twine’ method that sounds really cool (and drunkenly dangerous).
(Via MAKE Magazine.)
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