Our Rising Sound» gear

Guitar players build their sound – advice from James Duke

Kyle — Fri, 21 May 2010 18:38:16 +0000

Recently I had the good pleasure of interviewing James Duke (guitar player for John Mark McMillan) as well as review his new release from his new project called “All the Bright Lights.” That record is largely instrumental and is a collection of incredible guitar tones and textures. So when I saw a blog post from James discussing how he gets his tones, it got my attention.

James gives a lot of great advice in his post and I encourage you to read the entire post, but he opens up the post with some great general advice to guitar players.

“I have gotten a lot of emails lately asking for advice about how to get good guitar sounds. A lot of times I get asked something like “I have all the same stuff as you but i’m not getting the same sound for some reason”. I try to tell them , nicely, that they can buy everything I have, but it’s not going to make them sound like me. If that was the case I would have all of The Edge’s gear. And all of Jimmy Page’s gear. and I would have bought the same microphone as Bono…

I can play through anything and still sound like me. I can play through a line 6 spyder amp and still sound like me. I don’t enjoy that, mainly because a modeling amp just doesn’t respond the way a nice tube amp does. But I can make it work.”

Amplitube iRig for the iPhone/iPad

Kyle — Thu, 06 May 2010 22:58:39 +0000

IK makes some quality modeling software and from the looks of it, can build a pretty good iPhone app as well. They recently announced their Amplitube iRig for the iPhone/iPad which is a full amp and effects rack for bass and guitar. I don’t see any screenshots of it on an iPad so I’m wondering if they are just upscaling the iPhone app, which would be a bummer.

They will release 3 different versions of the app, free (2 stompboxes, 1 amp+cabinet, 2 microphones), LE @ $2.99 (4 stompboxes, 1 amp+cabinet, 2 microphones), and full @ $19.99 (entire collection of available gear with 10 stompboxes, 5 amps+cabinets and 2 microphones). Then you have to pay for the adapter to plug in your guitar which runs $39.99, which seems ridiculous to me. Here’s what IK has to say about it:

AmpliTube iRig is a combination of an easy-to-use instrument interface adapter and guitar and bass tone mobile software.

With AmpliTube iRig, you can plug your guitar into your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad and jam anywhere with world class guitar and bass tone right in the palm of your hand – from the leader in studio-class guitar and bass software.

Simply plug the iRig interface into your mobile device, plug your instrument into the appropriate input jack, plug in your headphones, amp or powered speakers, download AmpliTube for iPhone Free and start rocking!

You’ll have at your fingertips the sound and control of 3 recombinable simultaneous stompbox effects + amplifier + cabinet + microphone just like a traditional guitar or bass stage rig!

Add amps and effects as you need them — you can expand your rig with up to 10 stomps, 5 amps, 5 cabinets and 2 microphones in the AmpliTube iRig app custom shop.

Kings of Leon guitar rigs (Video)

Kyle — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 17:08:59 +0000

The guitar tech for Kings of Leon shows off their guitar and effect rigs. I like how straight forward they are, not really any trickery, all standard tunings, pretty straight up rigs. They just know how to write great rock music. I also dig that their lead guitarist plays my amp, Ampeg Reverbrocket FTW!

New Deluxe Memory Boy pedal from EHX

Kyle — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:23:01 +0000

Electro-Harmonix makes the absolute best analog effects pedals in the biz and the Memory Man is of course one of the all time great pedals that’s in nearly everyone’s arsenal, including mine. The one problem with it has always been no tap tempo. Even the Edge was bothered by this and would have to start a lot of U2′s songs because the tempo would be set by his delay settings. Well EHX went ahead and solved this and introduced a heck of a lot more(expression pedal, tap divide, …) with their new Deluxe Memory Boy pedal. I want it and I want it badly. Check it out:

TC Electronics Polytune: tune all strings at the same time

Kyle — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:28:51 +0000

Well this looks really cool. The new tuner from TC Electronics says it will tune all your strings at the same time, you just strum and it shows which strings are out of tune. If this works as advertised I want one. Selling for only $99, that seems almost too cheap to me. What you think, you gonna buy? Anybody already used it?

Tip: iPhone SPL dB Meter App

Kyle — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:18:13 +0000

There aren’t too many more touchy issues than volume when it comes to worship in the church. Usually the chain of events goes something like, lady in church complains to pastor it’s too loud, pastor tells the sound man to turn it down, sound man gets defensive and says he can’t control the mix with how loud the amps are on stage, sound man yells at the guitar player and guitar player says he can’t get the tone he wants with the amp turned to 1. Then more and more barriers are placed around the drummer for good measure.

Sound familiar? This is where a good SPL dB meter comes into play. It gives you a reading of how loud you are and gives you something consistent to set the mix to. They can range in price from $40 to $250, and for many churches it’s just not worth the money. Well in comes the iPhone and a nice, accurate SPL dB meter for $0.99. You can’t really beat that.

I used it at my church and we got a reading that the pastor was happy with and now we know from week to week what to set to. I’d highly encourage you to get some kind of dB meter, but this iPhone SPL dB meter certainly gets the job done. It even has some configuration options for using external mics, but comes pre-configured for the iPhone internal mic.

What music gear would you buy with $1000 ?

Kyle — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:41:51 +0000

Pretend I gave you $1,000 but you had to spend it on music gear. What would you get?

I’d get the new Abelton Suite and have a few hundred left over to buy a decent condenser mic, like a Shure KSM27 or Rode NT-1. What’s next on your list of music goodies?

Propellerhead “Record” Review: Reason + audio

Kyle — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:30:15 +0000

Record is Propellerhead’s latest software release that finally addresses the much requested feature of audio recording inside of Reason. But instead of adding it to Reason they created a new product. The price sounds right at $299 for all the features they’ve thrown in. Create Digital Music has a wonderful in depth review of Record and this video below gives a nice intro to the product as well. You can sign up for beta testing at www.record-you.com

How to get notified first of great music gear deals

Kyle — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:09:04 +0000

I’m always on the search for music gear that I want/need/lust after. I also have nowhere close to the amount of money I need to get the gear I thirst after. Craigslist is an obvious place to start when looking for local gear that people are trying to part with. The problem is so are thousands of other people in your area so the chances of you searching just at the right time to score the right gear at the right price aren’t all that great. Enter Craigslist RSS feeds.

1. Search in Craigslist for whatever specific gear you’re looking for

2. Copy RSS feed for search criteria

3. Add it to your RSS reader of choice

You can see that I have a few saved searches and I check everyday to see if any new items come up. I’m usually first to respond when they do. Although now maybe a few more Phoenix people are hip to Craigslist RSS feeds and I have some competition on my hands.

In any case this is a great way to score good deals. Happy shopping.

Steps to rebuilding my live guitar rig

Kyle — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:36:36 +0000

Guitar players know how live rigs work, you go through phases, tone phases, effects phases, minimalist to surrounding yourself in stompboxes. You sell things only to buy them back a couple years later. Well poor musicians like myself do anyway. So I find myself rebuilding a lot of what I tore down a couple years ago, but this time I have clearer vision to the tone I’m aiming for. I’m pretty close right now, but need a few things.

Current Gear:

Guitar: Sunburst American Strat
Amp: Ampeg Reverb Rocket 212
SKB Powered Pedalboard

Pedals:

My Shopping List:

VooDoo Labs Power Supply 2 (my SKB pedalboard power supply is dead and sux anyway)
Ernie Ball Mono Volume Pedal
EHX Big Muff Pi with Tone Wicker
Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler
Pedaltrain PT-Pro Pedalboard (current SKB board stinks)
EHX Holy Grail Plus Reverb
MXR Phase 100

Plenty more on the list long term, but this is my short term list and it’s over $1,000. Don’t tell my wife, she’ll pass out. BUT this is where you come in. If you or any one you know is selling any of this gear used, please pass it by me. I’d rather not get all this new. Or you can goto the ORS Store and buy some gear to help a brutha out. Contribute to my stimulus.

Recording your worship on a shoe-string budget

Kyle — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:34:21 +0000

In the last few months my church, Life Connection Church, has successfully setup a recording strategy that allows us to capture and track each channel before it gets to the board. This has many advantages over capturing board mixes. I wanted to share with you what we’ve done on truly a shoe-string budget.

What’s wrong with just recording the board mix?

The problems with a board mix are typically quality and flexibility. Starting with quality, your house mix is for just that, your house. This isn’t usually ideal for what sounds good in isolation(headphones) because you’re not mixing for isolation. You’ll find this especially true when mixing for small venues and have to deal with unruly stage volume.

Flexibility is lost when you just have a stereo recording and no tracks available to work with in post-production. There’s not many places to go with a stereo recording, you can do some EQ’ing perhaps but it’s all global, not individual instruments or vocals. So you can see how this impacts quality level.

How to capture tracks before the board

There are plenty of ways to do this but I’m going to show how we did it. For just over $400 we purchased the PreSonus FireStudio Project firewire recording interface. This has 8 XLR inputs and can be daisy chained with more units to satisfy however many channels you need to capture. So right from the snake we take the channels we want to capture and insert into the PreSonus and then use a 1/4″ patch cables out of the PreSonus unit into the board. Effectively using the PreSonus as an intercept unit, it does no processing (outside of the pre-amp) just passes the signal on to the board. So as far as the FOH is concerned there’s no change besides gain level with the PreSonus preamps.

One hurdle we had to clear was we didn’t have the funds to purchase more than one unit, yet we have about 15 channels in use that we needed to capture for live recording. Here’s where we had to get creative. 8 of those 15 channels were for the drums. So what we did was take the drum sub channel out into the PreSonus so now we take the board mix of the drums and have 1 channel of drums on the PreSonus. We have our drums on their own stereo sub channel on the board so this was as easy as taking the 1/4″ sub outs on the back of the board and routing them to the PreSonus. This isn’t ideal for the same reasons board mixes aren’t ideal, but has worked ok for us. Going forward we’d like to buy another unit dedicated for the drums.

What to use for recording the captured tracks

Being able to capture the tracks is one thing, but then what do you capture them to is the other part of the equation. There are numerous software recording tools you could use. PreSonus comes with Cubase but there’s also better options like Logic and Pro Tools. We use a free option, Garage Band for the mac. Eventually we’ll get another unit and then switch to Logic but presently for these demo mixes and for sermon podcasting this is suiting our quality needs just fine.

An important feature here is that this unit works whether you are plugged into a computer and recording or not. No rewiring is necessary when switching between the two.

What’s the bottom line cost?

PreSonus FireStudio Project = $425
1/4″ patch snake = $35
Recording software = $0 (Garage Band)

Total Cost: $460

You can listen to some of the mixes from our setup here and more recently here. You can hear the improvement in quality from the older sample to the more recent one as we get more use with the unit.

Video: Andrew Bird – “A Nervous Tic Motion” Live Looping

Kyle — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:02:23 +0000

Live looping is a technique made more popular recently by people like KT Tunstall, but it’s not really a new concept at all. Basically it consists of one or more musicians capturing live audio in a loop and adding more layers on to the loop throughout the song. Usually accomplished with something like a Boss Loop Station or Electro-Harmonix Super Multi-Track Looper. If done well it can be an incredible thing to see and hear.

Andrew Bird is an incredible musician, vocalist, live looper and whistler. In fact I’ve not heard many give as clean and on pitch whistle as Andrew. Noble Beast is Andrew’s latest album and it sounds incredible.

Here is a video of Andrew performing “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left“ live at Bonnaroo in ’06 showing off his sick live looping skills.

How to create your own click track in Garage Band

Kyle — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:42:47 +0000

I created a screencast to show you just how easy it is to create your own click tracks in Garage Band. You might also be interested in my post on an OSX BPM widget that lets you tap out the BPM for songs in your iTunes library. You can click through to the video on Vimeo to see it in HD where you can make out the menu options a bit better.

How to create your own click track in Garage Band from Our Rising Sound on Vimeo.

Video: Electro-Harmonix ‘Voice Box’ pedal

Kyle — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:27:54 +0000

This new Voice Box pedal from Electro-Harmonix looks awesome! Basically you route your mic and guitar through it and you’re able to pitch match harmonies and different vocal effects. It has a vocoder and built in reverb. I pretty much love everything Electro-Harmonix makes but this looks really fun. I’d love to get my hands on one of these. Retails for around $215.

[via Vertical Resonator]

Musicians are so last year, thanks MSFT Songsmith

Kyle — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:00:14 +0000

Microsoft is so cute, in that pathetic sort of way. They want so badly to be cool like their big brother Apple. I present to you….Songsmith.

[via blogtown.portlandmercury.com by way of James]

Video: Electronic saw demo

Kyle — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:00:48 +0000

1 $20 dollar hand saw from Lowe’s + 1 $15 dollar contact microphone = endless hours of whale mating noises. Very handy.

You can see some more of TJ’s instrumentalist skills at Brian Wurzell’s blog.

Ryan Adam’s ridiculous Princeton amp rig

Kyle — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:16:20 +0000

If you’ve seen Ryan Adams play live during the Cardinology tour you’ve noticed the giant cartoonish looking Fender amp he’s playing with. I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or if that was a real amp, I’d never seen any Fender amp that big. Thanks to some new pictures of it and a little help from the Cardinology blog it turns out he’s playing 4 Fender Princeton amps inside of a custom (fake) Fender case. This is awesome on a Spinal Tap scale, such grand overkill I love it.

How to setup your Mac laptop for live audio

Kyle — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:20:08 +0000

This site talks a lot of using loops in worship and I wanted to take a minute and talk about how to setup your laptop for playing any kind of audio live off your Mac. This posts focuses on mac because if you are relying on a windows machine to play any kind of live audio then you’ve already violated rule #1 which is:

When using a computer for any important, enjoyable or useful purpose make sure it’s a Mac.

If you’re still reading I’ll assume you haven’t violated rule #1 and congratulate you on your complete salvation. The 7 steps below will make sure that only your intended audio will be played on not any system alerts, make sure your system is isolated and configure display settings. It won’t get into specific application settings or audio interface settings. I’ll dive into those in separate posts for a specific application. This is a general post for all apps running on a Mac.

1. Quit all non-essential applications

Make sure you “quit” and not close.

2. Turn off Wi-Fi (no network connection)

If your machine has a network connection all sorts of background processes will fire, like MobileMe syncing, Time Machine backups, etc… You don’t want any CPU diverted from your audio apps.

3. Turn off system audio alerts

You don’t want any audio sent to any speaker set that isn’t coming from your main audio app. Goto System Preferences and select Sound.

Uncheck all 3 system alerts options.

Even if you have your system alerts selected to play through internal speakers instead of your audio interface, you still don’t want these alerts to play.

4. Set display settings

You don’t want your display going into a screen saver or sleeping during a live performance. Set your screensaver to never turn on by going to System Preferences and clicking “Desktop & Screen Saver”.

Now set your Energy Saving settings so your display doesn’t just shut off.

Remember to set your display settings back after you’re done performing so you don’t kill your display. You need to have a screen saver and the energy saver on normally.

5. Turn off Bluetooth

Another step that isolates your machine from other devices. You don’t want file transfer requests popping up in the middle of a set.

6. Disable remote controls

A common trick to play on someone with a Mac is to mess up their presentation with the apple remote. If you need to use your apple remote live than pair the remote so only your remote will work. Otherwise if you don’t need it, just easiest to turn it off.

Go into System Preferences and click on Security.

Disable remotes.

7. Configure application to use your audio interface

There are a lot of audio interfaces out there to use with your laptop. Just make sure in your application’s settings that you configure it to use your audio interface.

At this point you should be safe from all unexpected sounds, connections from other devices, malicious remote jokes and unexpected display screen savers and sleeping.

FanBand sells your digital music directly to fans…poorly

Kyle — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:36:01 +0000

Fanband aims to allow bands to sell digital copies of their music directly to fans at gigs. Fans enter their email address and myspace user name, select the songs they ‘d like to purchase, pay and the songs are sent to their email address. An additional benefit for the band is now they have collected an email address and myspace account to build their fan base with. No internet access or credit card terminal is required. I see that as a benefit in some situations but it would be much better if it was able to work with card terminals so you could accept credit cards as well as cash.

I think this is a great idea but unfortunately it looks like a bit of a hack. First off it only works on Windows and the design, at least aesthetically, is pretty poor. It looks like a crappy modified Myspace page quite honestly. So while I think it’s a good idea and something a lot of bands would find useful, including mine, it needs a lot of work. The fact that they are charging $39.00 for this is laughable. Spend 5 minutes and you can capture an email database with someone’s desired songs in Zoho and distribute the songs yourself for free.

Anyone used this and disagree?

Tool Tip: BPM Counter widget for Mac OSX

Kyle — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:17:46 +0000

When working with loops and click tracks one thing you need to know and preferrably know quickly is the beats per minute(BPM) of the song. I use this widget constantly to quickly get the BPM of a song I’m listening to in iTunes.

All you need to do is install it, then play the song in iTunes you want the BPM for, open your dashboard and tap the drum set along with the song and it will display the BPM. Then you can click the +Music icon on the right to save that into the song data in iTunes. Quick and easy and as accurate as you are of a mouse clicker. The only down side I’ve found is that it can get pretty CPU intensive if left open for long durations along with iTunes. iTunes ends up eating up more and more CPU. So watch out for that and if that’s happening make sure to close the BPM widget after using.

You can download it here.

Video: iDrum app for iPhone walkthrough

Kyle — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:07:32 +0000

The UI on this is pretty slick, quite apple’ish in fact. $5 seems quite reasonable as well, they have 2 versions, the Hip-Hop Edition and Club Edition.

iDrum for iPhone from Art Gillespie on Vimeo.

[via Synthtopia]

Lifesize MPC style midi controller made by Bwack

Kyle — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:54:55 +0000

Bwack, for those who don’t know, is David Crowder’s drummer. Always the innovator, Bwack built this 7ft, 750lb MPC style midi controller complete with mac, 22″ screen, 10 knobs, 8 momentary switches, 2 mod/pitch wheels and 16 led back-lit silicon pads.

Video: Hands on with Tenori-On, any practical use at all?

Kyle — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:30:34 +0000

The Tenori-On has been making some noise, no pun intended, amongst the tech-music geeks and the house/rave crowd. I see it as a complete novelty with no practical use outside the influence of ecstasy. The good thing is it totally doesn’t clash with glow sticks. Church folk you’ll have to excuse me cause you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Anyway finally here’s a video showing off its features in real time, I can see this being used by djs but that’s about it.

[via bryanknelson]

My stage setup, instruments, software, etc…

Kyle — Mon, 26 May 2008 22:09:42 +0000

Took a shot of my live setup with my iPhone this past Sunday. Thought it might be fun to diagram exactly what I play with.

Apple MacBook Pro (GR) – this is my workhorse. In addition to running Guitar Rig I use this for most all my personal work. It’s an older MBP but it gets the job done. 2.33 Ghz Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 120GB HD
Guitar Rig 3 – After leading worship and playing lead guitar in a lot of worship bands in smaller venues I was sick of dealing with stage volume issues. I was having to turn my amp down so low amp didn’t have the chance to get to the warm part of the tubes. Literally I was having to have my amp down at 1 so the FOH guys would stop complaining. So I was really limited in my tone and sound. All direct options whether software or multi effects had such poor quality and weren’t an option until I found Guitar Rig. I experimented with it on some recording projects, then tried it live and was very happy with the flexibility and sound quality. So this is my rig for small venues and I highly recommend it for congregations 300 or smaller.
Behringer FCB 1010 Midi Foot Controller – I don’t particularly like the foot controller that comes with Guitar Rig, so I just got the software edition and got my own midi foot controller. 2 foot pedals is a must, dedicated volume pedal then the other for trem speed, wah, what have you.
Presonus FireBox – “2 out of 3 musicians recommend Presonus for their firewire audio interface needs.” I’m one of the 2.
Apple Macbook Pro (Reason) -My newer machine. 2.4Ghz Intel Core Duo, 4GB Ram, 150GB HD
Reason 4 – I talked a bit about how this came to be in an earlier post. Slowly been integrating more synth tracks, live and recorded.
M-Audio Oxygen8 v2 – wanted something small and ultra portable with a decent amount of assignable controls and transport. This fit the bill. Great controller for Reason.

Guitars

Fender American Standard Strat 3-tone sunburst – not old enough to say the year yet. Over 10yrs old, less than 30.
Gibson Super Jumbo Acoustic, J100 Xtra – I love jumbo acoustics, I like them to sound full, deep and rich. Not a fan of bright acoustics.

Some other time I’ll diagram my amp and stomp box setup. So that’s what I play regularly, comment with your setup.

60s Ludwig Drums found at goodwill for $100!

Kyle — Fri, 23 May 2008 23:46:28 +0000

If this hadn’t happened to my own brother I wouldn’t believe it. Here’s what he managed to score at goodwill with real world value breakdown:

4 piece late 60′s Ludwig Blue Oyster Super Classic (acrolite snare)
- floor tom = $1,000
- tom = $500
- kick = $1,000
- snare = $200
original cases ($200)
Paiste Formula 602 cymbals ($600)
some sweet old school practice pads (vintage value…who knows)
spare Rogers Super 10 Snare ($200)
xylophone (do people pay for these?)

The best part is all this was originally $200 at goodwill but my bro just happened to show up on 50% day. Apparently $200 for all of this was just too much, they got to move product after all.

Adding it all up this is $3,700 worth of equipment bought for $100 at goodwill, with no guns involved, no threats of any kind, this was a peaceful transaction. I NEVER find anything good at goodwill much less this kind of treasure. Usually I start feeling sick after 5 minutes smelling the musty old clothes and run out screaming after seeing old men pick out someone else’s dirty underwear from the $0.10 rack. Leave a message on my brother’s facebook congratulating him on this robbery.

This raises a good question, what’s the best thing you ever scored from goodwill/thrift store?

Can you find the big mistake?

Kyle — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:58:20 +0000

When playing recorded intros in Reason there’s something you don’t want to do, unless you intentionally want to screw up the song and distract the entire congregation. I of course didn’t intentionally do this yesterday, but unfortunately intentions mean jack squat in music. No there is not going to be any video going up on You Tube so you all can laugh at me. Below is a screen shot of the intro I used for Ready Now, see if you can spot the problem. Hint: this is just an “intro”.

Screen shot with the answer after the jump.

Sequencer with pretty lights, TENORI-ON Demo

Kyle — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:28:03 +0000

I saw this a while ago but I guess it’s been officially released and is catching on. Seems more like a novelty than a useful instrument. It’s not doing anything more complex than your normal sequencer except that it has really pretty lights. I expect nothing less from Japan. Check it.

Every Mac musician’s nightmare

Kyle — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:29:41 +0000

I literally have nightmares about this. I play with 2 macs on stage so I guess my chances of this happening are double. Poor lil mac, I hope he woke up from his panic shutdown.

Working “Reason” into worship, drum loops, synths and other crazy things

Kyle — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 01:33:40 +0000

I have for quite some time been hoping for a Abelton Live/Reason/synth/jack of all trades musician to come to our church. I love working with it in the studio but I’ve always wanted to get it integrated into our live worship sets. Sadly that person has not walked through the door yet so I got myself a midi controller(M-Audio Oxygen 8), installed Reason and started hacking away.

I was very impressed with how easy Reason 4 was to work with. I was able to make some real progress really quick, the transport features are similar to standard recording software (Logic/ProTools), the mixer and components are all easy to work with. The patches it comes with are plentiful and give you plenty of avenues of creativity. So I was off and running there. I started looking at Abelton but it felt very Windowsy to me. Being a completely saved man (mac man) I can’t be havin that. So it’s just Reason for now.

This Easter we tried out our first go at playing with a Reason track. We did a stripped down acoustic version of Mighty Is the Power of the Cross by Chris Tomlin and integrated a reason track I recorded. I think we’ve been reasonably well paced in the progression of musical style in our church and I hope we haven’t left many behind. This was another leap forward and I must admit, my first try at it so it wasn’t all that great but it was a start. For the first time in a long time I was nervous. I was panicking that my computer would shut down or the track would pause or something funky. Thank God it went smoothly, giving me a bit more confidence using this live going forward.

So here’s a 2 minute cut from what we used on the outro. This of course had live vocals as well as an acoustic guitar.

Download audio file (Mighty_Is_the_Power_of_the_Cross.mp3)

Gibson introduces self-tuning guitar, dubbed ‘Robot Guitar’

Kyle — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:28:58 +0000

Gibson has released a self tuning guitar, they gave it the unfortunate name of ‘Robot Guitar’. How that name passed any level of critique is beyond me. It’s so very typical of the first iteration of any tech advance, where the name overplays the hand. Sooner or later this feature will probably be standard in most guitars and the name won’t make any reference to it. But for now we’ll be stuck with this I suppose.

I’m glad Gibson took a crack at it. If done well it could be a very useful feature. They packed it into a Les Paul which makes sense, with a name like Robot Guitar you’d almost expect a new model. Gibson claims Billy Corgan and Peter Townshend are already ‘using’ it. Using could mean Gibson sent them a free one and they opened the box and said it looks pretty. So I don’t know how much weight you can give that claim.

Robot Guitar ~~Ultra Machine Deluxe~~ auto-corrects strings out of tune and can store up to 6 different tunings. Also has a really cool way of setting intonation. You can checkout videos of it in action on Gibson’s website. I’m really impressed actually, looks well done. Robot retails for $2,900 which is pretty dang hefty. I’ll wait for the feature to become more standard.

Our Rising Sound» gear

Guitar players build *their* sound – advice from James Duke

Related posts

Amplitube iRig for the iPhone/iPad

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Kings of Leon guitar rigs (Video)

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New Deluxe Memory Boy pedal from EHX

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TC Electronics Polytune: tune all strings at the same time

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Tip: iPhone SPL dB Meter App

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What music gear would you buy with $1000 ?

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Propellerhead “Record” Review: Reason + audio

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How to get notified first of great music gear deals

1. Search in Craigslist for whatever specific gear you’re looking for

2. Copy RSS feed for search criteria

3. Add it to your RSS reader of choice

Related posts

Steps to rebuilding my live guitar rig

Current Gear:

Pedals:

My Shopping List:

Related posts

Recording your worship on a shoe-string budget

What’s wrong with just recording the board mix?

How to capture tracks before the board

What to use for recording the captured tracks

What’s the bottom line cost?

Total Cost: $460

Related posts

Video: Andrew Bird – “A Nervous Tic Motion” Live Looping

Related posts

How to create your own click track in Garage Band

Related posts

Video: Electro-Harmonix ‘Voice Box’ pedal

[via Vertical Resonator]

Related posts

Musicians are so last year, thanks MSFT Songsmith

[via blogtown.portlandmercury.com by way of James]

Related posts

Video: Electronic saw demo

Related posts

Ryan Adam’s ridiculous Princeton amp rig

Related posts

How to setup your Mac laptop for live audio

1. Quit all non-essential applications

2. Turn off Wi-Fi (no network connection)

3. Turn off system audio alerts

4. Set display settings

5. Turn off Bluetooth

6. Disable remote controls

7. Configure application to use your audio interface

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