Thursday, March 11th, 2010
This week we had the pleasure of test driving one of TouchChord’s newest iPhone apps - the TouchChord’s Songbook Rolling Stones. TouchChords has built a new way to learn music and practice guitar using your iPhone. They’ve built a suite of iPhone apps and have recently released a set of “songbooks” that include music from The Rolling Stones, The Police, Cat Stevens and James Taylor among others.
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Pink Floyd and EMI have been locked in a legal battle over the digital sales of the Floyd’s catalog on services like iTunes. Pink Floyd has argued their contract, signed before the era of digital downloads, requires the band’s approval to sell individual tracks. At stake is £10M ($15M USD) in unpaid royalties.
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Gibson has decided to get into the mobile app game and released their first effort with the “Gibson Guitar App“. The app features a tuner that can handle chromatic as well as open tunings, a metronome with tap tempo, chord charts and video lessons. After playing around with the app for a little while we’ve found it’s best feature to be it’s price - free.
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Bill Ruppert’s Effectology videos never cease to blow my mind. In this episode Bill recreates the beginning of Pink Floyd’s classic “Welcome to the Machine”. It’s important to note that no keyboards, samplers or MIDI guitar pickups are used in these videos. It’s just EHX pedals and mad genius Bill Ruppert. However he does use a Norelco shaver and an old dial tone from a phone…
Monday, March 1st, 2010
Here’s something that seems pretty cool and handy for guitar players - a portable tab player that connects right to the headstock of your guitar. The i-tab allows users to download backing tracks and video cover lessons from a library of fully legal tabs, tracks and lessons on www.i-tab.com.
Friday, February 19th, 2010
GuitarCourses.ws, a website directory of guitar courses, is attacking the problem of guitarists with insufficient knowledge of the guitar fretboard by offering a free software application designed to teach players the basics of fretboard navigation and allow them to practice their skills with and without their guitar. Check it out.
Friday, January 15th, 2010
If you happen to read music and you’re looking for an online collaborative way to share your compositions, you should check out Noteflight. Founded in 2008, Noteflight allows users to edit, display and play back music notation in a standard web browser and is integrated with an online library of musical scores from which anyone can publish, link to or embed. They’ve built a pretty slick web-based tool with a good user interface and have just launched premium services that further enhance their product offering.
Friday, January 15th, 2010
Line 6 has been a busy place. We’ve received more product announcements from Line 6 and we’re going to share the latest from NAMM with you. A few of the new announcements include the Relay Digital Wireless Systems, the MIDI Mobilizer and a free software update that delivers a bunch of new effects for the Line 6 POD X3 products.
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
We used to talk about Rock Band and Guitar Hero quiet a bit. Not so much anymore. Turns out 2009 was a down year for those games but there are still millions of players. You Rock Guitar is a both an actual guitar and a game controller for the popular Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games. You Rock Guitar comes out next month for $180 (USD).
You can plug into Guitar Hero and bust out perfect version of “Stranglehold” and then plug into your computer, play that same song for real, and be brought back to reality. Sign me up.
Sunday, January 10th, 2010
Paul Reed Smith has released a new iPhone app that combines a guitar amp simulator, an accurate tuner, and a song practice tool which lets you upload your original ideas, jam along to hits, and slow down riffs and solos for easier learning. The new iPhone app is called the PRS Jam Amp and is on sale now in the iTunes store for $9.99.
Before you buy make sure you’ve read this review. There are some considerations to think about before buying the app.
