Coming soon to a star system near you! Last week I dared all incautious chumps you to prognosticate about our guitaristic future. I knew the resulting comments thread would be fun, but I didn’t expect it to be that fun! And also oddly uplifting. Future predictions just seem to skew in an optimistic […] 
“We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.” — Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space UPDATE: Wow, I can’t believe all the cool stuff folks have been posting to comments. I find myself feeling quite inspired about the […] 
Ever notice how most analog vs. digital battles discussions boil down to two basic questions? 1. Can digital sound as good as analog? 2. What are the practical benefits of digital? They’re good questions, but they tend to overshadow another important (and probably more interesting) topic: What are the musical benefits of digital? Everyone loves […] 
Anyone here ever owned a synth guitar? Not a Keytar, but a guitar fitted with a hexaphonic pickup that transmits MIDI data to external devices? And if so, do you readily admit it? The synth guitar has had one of the most checkered histories outside of, well, checkers. Since the ’70s, many brilliant minds […] 
Does music groove more when all the effects are in sync? What’s better: synchronizing your modulation and delay effects strictly to tempo? Or “freewheeling” it, and letting the effects wobble and drift a bit? I eagerly embraced tap-tempo stompboxes when they appeared — how liberating to re-clock your effects without stooping over and […] 
A sad, desolate place — but not for long! One cool thing about going indie with tonefiend is that fact that I can finally host my own geek forum! It’s already up and running — but it’s a sad, vacant space that desperately needs to be populated by cool people and cool ideas. […] 
Now with more secrets — and less secrecy. Last winter I tried an odd experiment: a website where players were encouraged to post their best tone secrets — the kinds of tricks and techniques that are almost too good to share. But in order to get, you had to give: The site was […] 
Hey man — what happened to your amps? No question about it: Amps are awesome, and guitarists will be plugging into them for a long time to come. But as threatened in this post from last week, I’ve been experimenting with direct- recorded guitar sounds. I’m not talking amp simulators, but the sound […] 
I haz a band. My ol’ pals at Guitar Player magazine interviewed me for an instructional article on looping for next month’s issue. It was especially flattering to be invited, because the interviewer was Barry Cleveland, a fine guitarist and a leading figure in the looping community. I put together this little video […] 
Amazing things at NAMM, #1,287: Bootsy Collins's right hand. Just got back from a couple of days at the 2012 NAMM convention in Anaheim. And I’m glad to be writing about it rather than talking about it, because I have no voice left from screaming over several days of unbelievably loud ambient noise. […] |
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