Now having seen fold-up guitars in briefcases, here’s another approach to what to put in your portable guitar rig, from our friend Kevin Johnsrude of The Nettles. Kevin plays both bass and guitar, but he has a more portable rig so he can play music everywhere. Kevin writes:

In the photo:

The diagonal headless guitar is an old-school Traveler headless guitar minus
the knee rest.

The purple box is a Korg Pandora with tuner, multiple effects, crummy
sampler/looper and drum tracks. I have a modified jazz guitar dialled-in for
most of my practice and I use the drum tracks for my metronome when I’m not
playing with recordings.

The headphones are Radio Shack folding headphones.

The small black box is a 1 GB Creative Nano which holds all the repertory that
I’m currently practicing plus an audiobook.

Missing from photo:

Shubb capo (which fits on the head of the headless guitar)

iRiver ifp-799T which I keep with my gigging guitar for recording gigs for
future practice. Theoretically, I should be able to hookup a mic to the Nano
but I haven’t bothered with that yet.

~50 double-sided xerox pages of practice tunes.

The nylon carry case which is about the length of a pool cue case but a bit
fatter.

There you have it. Wherever I go, it goes. Life is too short not to play music.

Got a portable guitar/bass rig (or otherwise) you’re proud of? Let me know.

At first, I thought FretPet was a virtual fret interface with MIDI output to your favorite soft synths. And so it is. But closer inspection reveals a lot more.

This Mac tool, newly available for OS X with an expanded feature set, is a unique way of exploring pitch and chords. If you know nothing about theory, you could use it to adventure through pitches in new ways, just by fiddling with your guitar. If you are into theory, you can get deep into harmonic relationships and creating your own custom guitar tunings. As a composer who’s struggled a bit with guitar tunings as a non-guitarist, it has yet another dimension.

You’ve officially lost your excuse for being out of tune. Thanks to the wonders of modern science, you can now tune with your:

iPod, via iRocker

Mac/PC guitar effects software using tools like the built-in tuner included in Guitar Rig

4-track digital recorder thanks to Korg’s D4

Portable audio recorder using the built-in tuner included with Edirol’s R1

Widget using the Mac/PC Konfabulator widget Guitar Tuner

Now, on top of all these options, you can pocket Fender’s new US$19.95 keychain guitar tuner, too. (You’ll be able to start up your El Camino and tune your guitar with a keychain. Plug in a guitar cable (via minijack, it looks like), and tune away. Compared to some of the other options, this one is pretty bare-bones: it only tunes E. (Fender helpfully suggests fretting E on your other strings, if you hadn’t already figured that out.) But as a stocking stuffer, this can’t be beat.

Fender speed-E Guitar Tuner, via Gizmodo via Distortion That Rocks

Hey, by the way — Distortion That Rocks is a really cool guitar blog, completely free of my “We Are the Computers” / pro-keyboard bias.

The iRocker is a set of tools for guitarists you can load on your iPod. For beginners, iRocker includes a virtual chordbook with 200 chords and fingerings, plus a guide to scales. 5 different chord progressions / riffs are provided for playing along. More useful to most of the readers here, though: iRocker includes a set of guitar tuning recordings with a variety of tunings, and a basic 10-speed metronome. iRocker comes from Talking Panda, who brought us iBar (probably more my speed, history of whiskey and whatnot.)

US$29.95; you’ll need a late-model iPod; Early models and Shuffles are unsupported.)

An intriguing concept, though of course your PDA or Treo can be a full-featured metronome, and a real tuner has more than just recordings. And is it just me, or does this make you want to load up your iPod / music player with lots of Jamey Aebersold recordings? (Ask a jazz player if you didn’t get that.)

Have you come up with clever uses for your iPod, music player, or other portable device? What do you load onto it when you’re on the road? Let me know, and I’ll do a roundup. (Later this week: why I find an old iRiver player more useful than an iPod.)

From the Share Skype site comes an interesting application of voice conferencing: getting your band together.

As a background, our band Liquid Playground is reuniting and performing for our 10 year college reunion at Princeton in May, but the problem is we haven’t seen or played with each other for 7 years. time heals most wounds and we are all happy to get back together for a reunion gig. Here is how we set it up: Three of us were in my garage in Redwood City, CA (drums, vocals, keyboards), the bass player was in Colorado, and the guitar player was in Boston. Each remote player had an amp in their room near their computer and a mic. I had a wireless laptop and mic in the garage and ran my audio out into an amp in the garage. I set up the Skype conference and when the remote users would talk or play, they’d be coming through the amp just as if they were in the garage.There was an issue of slight delay in that we couldn’t all sync up real-time while we were playing. However, we quickly learned to ignore some sounds as we were playing if they were behind the beat. But 50% of this rehearsal was trying to remember what the heck we played and how we played it, and Skype was perfect for this: Pete in MA would ask how a chord progression went. It’s amazing we pulled it off, but Skype is a huge reason why we won’t suck as much when we finally get on stage again!

Skype sounds like a great solution to me, particularly with cross-platform support (I’m running Skype on my Macs, PC, and PocketPC). It’s not the only solution: I saw a percussion teacher do a remote class with a group of marimbists across the country via iChat AV.

Have you tried any of this tech for distance learning or music practice?

Ever wished you could see the Circle of Fifths (aka Circle of Fourths) displayed on your clock? Well, now you can. And you can even click individual keys to see key signatures, just in case y— hey, wait a minute! Speaking as a sometimes-theory teacher, are you telling me you haven’t learned your keys yet? What are you going to do when your handy Dashboard clock isn’t handy? You’re not going to know your key signature for C# major, that’s what. Or maybe this is a new way of telling time, like, I’ll see you at half past G-flat? I’m confused. Now go get your vaguely new age-looking key signature clock; if nothing else, you’ll look like the music nerd you are:

Circle Clock Beta1 Widget for OS X Tiger [Dashboard Lineup]

No, not that kind of playmate. (Sorry.) The killer feature of Alesis’ new PlayMate Guitarist is (really!) a CD player: pop in a CD of music and you can change the tempo without affecting pitch. Throw in 80 guitar effects and a helping of I/O, and this definitely makes a cool gadget bag addition for practicing guitarists. If you can find an excuse for the US$299 list price by coming up with something to do with the FX, even non-guitarists may want one for transcribing solos. (via Harmony Central)

Vocalists, there’s a vocal version, too — because you can never really practice successfully without reverb.

The ThinAmp from AXL,
introduced in January at NAMM, is a portable amp packed into the size
of a laptop: only 2" thick and just 5 lbs. (!) You can literally fit it
into a laptop bag — in fact, you can probably fit it and your laptop
into a laptop bag. The amp is geared at guitarists, but Synthtopia reviews it and finds it suitable for laptop, too.

Of course, you can't expect a whole lot of sound out of a 2" amp; while
it has EQ and DSP presets for reverb, vibrato, flanger, chorus, and the
like, the ThinAmp's sound will be a bit thin with just 10W of power. On
the other hand, for US$140 street and at this size, this is pretty
tempting.

Polarity's new Tubester 1
is a freeware VST plugin combining preamp, EQ, and guitar speaker
simulator. AmpliTube it ain't, but if you need a quick-and-dirty tube
amp plug with low CPU overhead, this could be the trick. There's no
custom UI; it uses whatever your host supplies. (via Harmony Central)

While you're there, check out Riffster Lite,
a free app for transcribing phrases from music, with variable tempos
and phrase selection. The pro version is US$24.99 and adds more tempo
options, EQ, instrument cancelling, CD lookup, and other features.

Both are Windows-only.