The most important music gear fair (namm2009) is behind us and slowly we get a grasp of what oddities we can buy the coming year. First we take a look at this very guitar Rack.

Building a guitar Wine Rack is so wrong in many ways. It implies that Guitar players have an excellent taste. This manufacturer must understand that if such a guitarplayer is to be found, he probably couldn’t afford the proper wine to fill such a rack.
My guess: this thing will wind up in a shoddy dressing room with cigarette stains filled with half empty beer-bottles.

If you fit the above description you can always go to:

Littleguitargifts

More Namm2009 oddities coming!

Fridgebuzzz, an Electronic manufacturer created a one of a kind synthesizer. Using an old Atari400 case completely strip it, and fill it with new electronics. Now it is a 12 oscilator and 3 modulator square wave synth. The fact that the keys are old-style arcade push buttons make my heart skip a beat.

Unfortunately it is a one of a kind, but they are working on a portable version. Frankly I couldn’t care less about the synth specs in there. I’d just create a little shrine in my studio and put this behind bullet-proof glass.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/01/13/the-atari-400-goes-a.html [BOINGBOING]

I’m almost finishing the small tour we did with a George Harrison tribute “While my guitar Gently Weeps”. Last night returning from the gig I listened to Coverville ep.519, and behold a great cover of that particular song was in that very episode. I had to stop the car to laugh and to listen to the awesomeness even better. Not only that but I could be downloaded legaly AND free here

Snippet from the forums:
Lemon Demon:  “Sadly I didn’t actually use the keytar in this. It’s lovely but not quite as lovely as my microkorg.”

Forum member response : “A microkorg is just a keytar in need of a strap”

Now this is annoying. Dalhousie University professor Jason Brown has made an extensive study about the opening chord of ‘A Hard Days Night’. The reason why is because this chord sounds so fat, no guitar player ever could copy it. For the one reader who has no clue what I am talking about, press play will ‘ya!

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In my humble opinion this starts with the proper guitar, the proper amplifier AND record that in a proper room, and be done with it, but it goes one step further. Because of a new version of Melodyne (a pro -audio plugin for mangling and surgically alter sounds) he could extract each note of that chord and listen to it. I am not going to bother you with the details, you can read all about that in this 4 page pdf, but I can pretty much sum up the study in a few lines.

The reason the chord is so fat was, according to producer George Martin, because they knew that single chord was the opening of the album AND the movie. They were just going for the biggest bang they could come up with.
What’s in this study is a piece of music-geekdom I don’t even want to touch with a ten foot pole.
George playes a 12 string guitar in his solo, so it is safe to assume he uses the same guitar for the opening chord. He uses these notes, but that leaves out these notes, which could be played by John’s guitar. ***insert schnauzer gagging here***

To me a good record is like a movie: I don’t want to know how it’s made, I want to enjoy the organ sound, recorded through a fan, a wah-wah pedal an routed through a Marshall stack to give it some extra oomph. It’s still sounds like an organ, but it will be ‘different’

Every beatle recording has been extensively documented numerous books about those have been released over the last 40 years. To me further studies in that is just a waste of money and time.

I don’t know how much money went into this study, but I just took the sample and reproduced it in 5 minutes…by taking the 21th century route: SAMPLING!  I even played smoke on the water with it, because that was the stupidest thing I could think of commenting on this news. (on a sidenote: what I did was illegal, but that is a whole different discussion)
Thank you very much.

A hard days smoke

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source

Henry Lim, a musician and Lego-fanatic, build himself an instrument. From his page you can see that he already was doing 2d pictures, and even a full size statue of Queen Amidala , but this time he started out building a Grand piano. Due to the enormous amount of pressure a grand piano takes from the tension of 88 strings he figured a Harpsichord would be a more reasonable goal.

Lego-Ukelele
Lego-Hammond organ (easy because it is just the case, the rest is electrical)
Lego-tuba
Lego-gameboy daw…hmmm

Check his page for more pictures, the whole production process and audio-clips of the instrument.
http://www.henrylim.org/LEGOSculptures.html

Thanks to ‘Catrian’, who went through the effort of searching for this old school piece of gear in her house and getting it to me, I am now the proud owner of a new DAW.
In case you didn’t know; DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation. And mine is a vintage piece of gear.
This is NOT an instrument. it is a full fletched workstation. It has 4 channels, meaning 2 pulse channels 1 wave channel and 1 noise channel. Al can be panned individually left, right or center. I’ll explain about the program it is running when the audio is finished. Heck I even found a website where they compared the sound quality of the different types of gameboys up to the Gameboy Advance. Guess what? The oldest sounded the FATTEST!
Of course it did. It looks WAY cooler than any DS out there. Image riding on the train with this thing. Old School FTW! I even heard a rumor that a few games have been released for this thing

Audio examples coming up.

Scott at Modd3d installed a midi port to his microwave. Now he can defrost a corn dog by playing a few notes. That brings a few ideas to my mind for the studio. One of them is a midi controlled Coffee machine : in the middle of a session just play the ‘Coffee in Brazil’- song and within 5 minutes your prayers have been heard.

found via

My new years resolution is becoming true now. I bought this 1963 Hammond organ in January this year . And it took sjaak up until yesterday to finish it. So it was transformed from this lovely sweet lady:

into this beast:

The organ comes in two cases now. One for the tone-generator, and one with the keyboards and amplifier. All the contacts, soldering contacts, wires, -you name it- are brand new. The inside looks shiny, as if I walked into a music store in 1963 and bought this thing off the shelf.
Speakon connections on the back to hook it up to 2 leslie cabinets. All the keys have been painstakingly modified, felt and action has changed.
I’ve been playing it for 10 minutes and I played some lines that I normally never could do. (I swear this is true) The very first chord gave me goosebumps.

Of all the organs I played in my life, this has to be my nr. 1, and the good part of the story is: it is mine!

To clarify this story: this feels like playing a 50$ guitar for 20 years and suddenly you have a Gibson es335 1963 in your hands.

Now comes the funny part: I’ll be having an incredibly busy weekend, doing gigs all over, but I’m not allowed to bring a Hammond organ to those concerts: ‘Rob, we really need a philicorda sound this Sunday’ I couldn’t make this up.

These thing pop up a lot lately. Press some buttons, drag the sliders to mix a little and off you go.

Now only a way to combine and record them all, and the internet is my next daw.

LINK

Yes, you read it correctly: an acoustic guitar. Phew…
Imagine getting a proper amp for an electric guitar that size..

ebay-link