Guitar Noize

Press Release
After initial showings at NAMM and Musikmesse trade shows, MMG Distribution is now shipping the Ogre Tubeholic overdrive guitar effects pedal. The new pedal is the first in a series that has been designed to change what musicians can expect from their effects pedals. Looks alone are not what set these pedals apart from the competition, these pedals have been re-engineered to delivery top shelf tones and performance.

The Ogre Tubeholic utilizes a highly durable enclosure and features a sliding cockpit head cover to protect the settings during use. Inside the cockpit are the Level, Tone and Gain control knobs that provide guitarists versatility in using the pedal for simple clean boosts, crunchy guitar rhythms or searing lead tones with enough versatility for everything in between. The units’ piercing blue eyes house LED’s to indicate on/off functions. Internally, the Tubeholic utilizes PCB construction to help prevent external sound interference and insure a quality signal between the input, controls and output. While in the off position, the pedal maintains true bypass to eliminate any sacrifice of overall tone or sound degradation.

MSRP: $299

Check out Premier Guitar’s video from MusikMesse 2014 where they look at the entire Ogre pdeal range.

By the way I really want to try one of their Magnesium Ogre guitars, they look just as badass as their effects pedals!

This is an amazing story, please take a moment to watch the video above that explains how a community in Haiti that struggle to even get water daily are being helped out by an organisation called Raincatchers, who not only to help them catch fresh rain water but to supply them with guitars that can survive the extreme climate that normally destroy acoustic guitars, all thanks to Peavey Composite Guitars.

Raincatchers team member Chad Dohring learned just how much experiencing guitar meant to the townspeople when he brought out his acoustic guitar. While many of the residents had never seen or heard a guitar before, they were equally amazed and delighted by the instrument.

Composite Acoustics revolutionized the acoustic guitar market with the introduction of instruments totally built from composite materials. Carbon fiber allows Composite Acoustics to create a guitar that is more consistent than any other acoustic guitar on the planet — no matter the climate conditions. Their unique production process combines extensive hand-crafting with cutting edge technology such as CAD design and CNC machining, resulting in an innovative, consistent, brilliant-sounding and highly durable guitar.

Plus, the nature of carbon fiber produces an instrument that stays in tune longer and never needs adjustment. By varying the carbon fiber material density in different areas of the body, Composite Acoustics instruments are able to achieve a finely tuned tone that is consistent from instrument to instrument. Carbon fiber construction and heelless neck joints also allow for instrument shapes not possible with wood.

Dohring received a Composite Acoustics Cargo guitar, and started teaching music at the new school in Haiti. “The hope that is filled on their faces when they play and sing and make music is amazing. Music brings hope. It really does,” he says. In addition to the lessons that Dohring oversees, the Composite Acoustics Cargo guitar is left there for students to use on a regular basis.

Only yesterday I posted about the new DigiTech Drop pedal, a dedicated polyphonic drop tune pedal, and today I wake up to news in my inbox about yet another new DigiTech pedal. The DigiTech Luxe is what DigiTech are calling, “…the world’s first stand-alone, compact, polyphonic detune pedal,” and an “anti-chorus”

The Luxe is related to the Drop Pedal in that it isolates the detune effect from the Whammy™ Pedal into a dedicated stand-alone pedal and adds positive and negative detune capabilities. If you’ve never tried using a detune effect it is a really simple way to thicken up your guitar tone, Eddie Van Halen used this effect a lot on the ‘5150, album.

The Luxe detune will add consistent “thickening” to your signal without the modulating side effects introduced by a chorus effect. Whether you’re playing single notes or chords, the Luxe provides a lush, solid, and true pitch-detuning effect. Clean guitar chords shimmer. Distorted guitar harmonics are richly enhanced. The Luxe simply just makes everything sound better.

Controls
LEVEL - Adjusts the mix of detune signal with dry signal
DETUNE - Adjusts the detune amount from -50 to +50 cents

For more info check out http://digitech.com/en-US/products/luxe

It is a pretty well documented fact that I have something of a guitar pick addiction, I have tried hundreds and have them littered around my house, guitar cases, jeans pockets and probably inside the inner workings of my washing machine! When I hear about a new pick manufacturer I get a little excited, especially if they include some scientific information about their pick material.

Enter the Dragon’s Heart

Dragon’s Heart Guitar Picks are available in three variations which I’ll come to in a moment but first information about their carefully selected core material. The material used is a polyamide-imide, often used in aerospace applications as replacement for metallic alloys. It’s low friction coefficient makes it extremely fast playing. It’s high erosion resistance makes it ideal for enduring the punishment of stringed instrument play. Aside from the scientific evaluations made on many popular pick materials, various popular pick designs were also analysed.

Each pick was precision measured for string displacement, curve radii, attack angles, return stroke distance and continuous stroke distance; relative to various grip placements and playing styles. After many stages of evolution, the optimal design was precision blueprinted for injection mold mass production.

Armed with all of this scientific data the Dragon’s Heart was designed with 3 playing edges to cater for different playing styles, “The primary lower edge offers the greatest balance between speed and attack. The sharp right upper lobe offers a very aggressive attack while maintaining speed and consistency. The rounded left upper lobe was designed with fast strumming and harmonics in mind.”

Here are the 3 variations of the Dragon’s Heart Guitar Pick

Original

Made from a carefully selected polyamide-imide, the original dragon’s heart has 12% graphite content, making it extremely fast. It’s speed is surpassed only slightly by it’s durability, One of these can endure over 1000 hours play before the edges become less than ideal. This is the best selection for speed shredding players.

Pure

With the same signature design as the original, the Pure Heart has no additives. The pure polyamide-imide has a classic softness to it’s attack whilst still offering the optimal design and desired durability (up to 1200 hours). Ideal for players who have varied styles of play or are still developing there technique.

Hardened

A glass filled variation of the original. This version is the pinnacle of versatile material and our longest lasting pick period (up to 1500 hours of play). Balanced versatility for attack, lubricity, and durability the Hardened Heart is the choice for professionals that demand the most from their picks.

For more information or to purchase please head over to http://www.dragonsheartguitarpicks.com/.

When I reviewed Riffstation back in April 2012 I was really impressed. The Riffstation have continued to develop and improve their product and have just released version 1.5 which includes some pretty significant updates including the following:

• The “Tempo” tool can now slow down music to 1/4 of the original song’s tempo
• The audio quality of the Tempo tool has been improved.
• A more accurate chord detector is released with this version.(Still limited to Maj / Min and 7th but much more consistent than before)
• The loop tool can now select beats from the very start of the song.

Also in previous point releases these features were added:

• CD Audio loading is now supported
• Audio Device Selection is now supported
• Capo feature added. You can set a capo chord position without affecting pitch
• Fine Tune feature improved. Now the fine tune goes from -0.5 to +0.5 semitones
• flac, aif & aiff support added

If you haven’t tried Riffstation yet you can download a free 30 day trial for Mac or PC from Riffstation.com.

Win 1 of 5 copies of Riffstation

If you would like to be entered into the draw to win a copy of Riffstation 1.5 valued at USD$49.99 enter your details into the form below. The competition is open worldwide and a winner will be drawn at random on Monday 30th June 2014. Good luck!

The Digitech Drop is a dedicated polyphonic drop tune pedal that allows you to drop your tuning from one semitone all the way down to a full octave with a press of a button, rather than sweeping an expression pedal like the Whammy. The Digitech Drop does also feature a momentary/latching switch which when set to momentary can have a similar effect to the whammy, Digitech say it enables “Fast trills and roller-coaster pitch dips.”

The effect will be enabled or disabled only as long as the footswitch is pressed and held in momentary mode, whereas setting this switch to “OFF” will cause the footswitch to act as a standard latching on/off switch.

Alice Cooper has annouced that Nita Strauss, most famous for being a member of The Iron Maidens, Femme Fatale and more recently in the LA Kiss football team band, will replace Aussie guitarist Orianthi on his latest US tour. The summer tour starts with three shows in Michigan June 26-28 before Cooper joins Motley Crue’s final “All Bad Things Must Come To An End” tour as a Very Special Guest on July 2nd, running through late November.

For dates and tickets head over to Alice Cooper’s website.

Check out more info on Nita Strauss over at her facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/NitaStrauss

When I was first sent ChordShaker and read that it was an app to learn guitar chords by placing your fingers on the screen my initial reaction was that I would hate it, it’s not a guitar you should practice on a real guitar! Out of curiosity I opened the app on my iPhone and gave it a try and was pleasantly surprised. Sure it doesn’t feel anything like a real fretboard but imagine this scenario, you’re sitting on the train or bus for your morning commute to work or school and use ChordShaker to memorise chord shapes. Most of what goes into learning chords is having the ability to instantly recall the chord shape with your fingers and knowing which strings to place them on, this is where ChordShaker can help you. What it can’t do is help you actually fret those notes correctly on a real fretboard but at least you won’t have the struggle of trying to remember the chord shapes while you are attempting to make each note ring out perfectly.

Learning songs

Once you have mastered the fingerings of a few chords you can test yourself with one of the 100 included songs which tell you when to change chord and which chord to play as you jam along. You can see a demonstration of this feature in the video above, as you can see you get instant feedback if you haven’t got the correct fingering so that you can make adjustments to place your fingers correctly.

So how much is it?

Well the good news is that ChordShaker is free! Yep, you don’t pay a cent. The only stipulation is that you need an iPhone, sorry Android users. Now for free you get a whole load of songs to jam along to which you unlock as you progress but if you want to access all 100 hit songs there is a VIP access in-app fee of $6.49, obviously this is optional and you can learn plenty of songs with the free version.

ChordShaker has been designed as the first stage in Musopia’s guitar app series, where beginners learn the chords, then progress up to the next stage with the FourChords Guitar Karaoke where you can learn to play over 500 hit songs with easy chords and lyrics. While FourChords is also a free download you do need a subscription to unlock the entire catalogue of songs which starts at $1.99 per month.

Paula Lehto, Musopia CMO said: “Tools like this can make the world of difference to learning an instrument. With over 80% of beginner guitarists quitting within the first 6 months*, we are using mobile technology to make music making more accessible. We designed ChordShaker to make learning guitar fun, rewarding and intuitive, and most importantly, to keep players playing - ChordShaker is the guitar teacher in your pocket.”

ChordShaker is free via the Apple App Store: http://goo.gl/RlMbP8

ArtistWorks and Sadowsky Guitars are celebrating the launch of Chuck Loeb’s Online Jazz Guitar School by giving away a beautiful archtop Sadowsky LS-17.

To enter head over to the contest page here - http://go.artistworks.com/win-a-sadowsky-jazz-guitar-from-artistworks.

Membership to Chuck Loeb’s Online Jazz Improv School includes unlimited access to hundreds of pre-recorded lessons that simplify jazz improvisation and complicated modes and scales. Additionally, via ArtistWorks’ patent-pending Video Exchange™ Feedback Platform, members can submit practice videos to Loeb using a standard Smartphone, tablet or computer. Chuck Loeb then reviews the submissions and provides a precise, and efficient individualized video response containing personalized feedback and additional instruction.

Video Exchanges are paired together on the site and made available for all members to learn from, creating a constantly growing, ever-evolving virtual master class online.

Chuck Loeb, whose career has spanned more than four decades and who plays guitar in the contemporary jazz group Fourplay, states, “I love teaching, but because of my travel and recording schedules, it’s nearly impossible to schedule traditional master classes and clinics,” said Loeb. “When fellow ArtistWorks instructors Nathan East and John Patitucci approached me about this incredible program, I was hooked. It’s a brilliant way to get busy artists and students together to interact on a regular basis, and in a meaningful and never-before-possible way.”

SLASH featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators will release their new album ‘World On Fire‘ on September 16 via SLASH’s own label Dik Hayd International distributed through Caroline. The title track will hit the radio in a couple of days (June 13th)

This is Slash’s third solo album and the second with this particular lineup which features Alter Bridge frontman Myles Kennedy on vocals, Brent Fitz on drums and Todd Kerns on bass. ‘World On Fire’ was produced by Michael “Elvis” Baskette (Alter Bridge, Falling In Reverse, Incubus) and features 17, yes 17 songs including an instrumental (follow up to “Watch this’?).

Check out the official video for the ‘World On Fire’ single: