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]

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.

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.

At the center of the program is an insanely-deep virtual fretboard, with the ability to route MIDI to a soft synth like Kontakt. But that’s just one palette: there’s an interactive-color coded palette for exploring scales, a way of turning chords into sequences and sequencing picking patterns, guitar frames, and more.

It’s a totally different way of approaching pitch on guitars. I may have to write a new piece for solo guitar now! Guitarists, I’d love to hear what you think of this, especially if someone wants to do a review.

FretPet X (Mac only)

In case we didn’t have enough reasons to love this developer, they’ve developed drivers for old serial Wacom tablets, in case you’re using them as a musical tool. Oh, and more sources of endless Zork frustration, for something completely unrelated.

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.

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.)

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.

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.