NIN: Echoplex – Live at Rehearsals, July 2008 from Nine Inch Nails on Vimeo.

Jaymis at Create Digital Motion was admiring this video and watching the Lemur action at the beginning. It further inspires me to custom-install a touch overlay on my laptop, which isn’t terribly expensive – having touch in a live playing situation is really quite nice.

But as I watched the video and its modular synth action and Novation gear, I actually found myself thinking about something else: why aren’t more bands this tight? Most importantly, why don’t more bands simply use in-ear monitors when they’re working? Lots of bands now are adding drum machines again, working with more complex rhythms and harmonies, mixing electronic and acoustic elements. Yet you’ll often see them playing live trying to stay together with a monitor on the floor, and they not surprisingly go out of tune and out of step.

Shure makes a number of fairly affordable models with different in-ear attachments for adapting to different situations. Frankly, just about anything would work. There’s also no crime to routing a separate output with a click track. That’s something even a lot of “serious music” contemporary composers are doing these days. It’s not always the right answer, but there are now situations across genres where it makes sense.

The main thing is, set up so you can take advantage of the musicianship you’ve got. And on that note, while readers here regularly knock Nine Inch Nails – something along the lines of, “if they weren’t NIN, you wouldn’t care” – imagine if you hadn’t heard of this band. They’re an extraordinary group of musicians. Plenty of brilliant musicians labor in obscurity, but it is comforting to know that some of the light of fame is hitting people who can play amazingly well.

Now, sing along: “You will never ever ever ever / own this much gear.”

What? That’s not what they’re singing?

(Actually, the lyrics “You will never ever ever ever get to me in here” can also work nicely on the door to your music studio.)

NIN Visuals:

For once, the visual environment is actually upstaging the sound gear lust. See this video on the “stealth” LED screens, cameras, particles, and … lasers. Mmmmm, lasers.

LEDs In The Sky: MomentFactory’s “Show Environment” for Nine Inch Nails [Create Digital Motion]

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.)