Best Friend Forever Login

For the past year I’ve been thinking a lot about solo guitar interfaces. One of the challenges with being a guitarist and playing solo is that both hands are almost constantly busy with the guitar and your feet are usually busy with pedals. Doesn’t leave a lot of other options.

I’ve thought up a lot of ways the guitar as an interface could be improved or augmented and the simplest idea seems like it would be to put a bunch of easily accessible buttons in the guitar and have those buttons simulate keystrokes on my laptop. How hard could that be? Let’s see.

Step one:

I ordered some Seimitsu PS-14 arcade buttons. A lot of the buttons I found were wayyyy too deep (such as these) but these ones looked like they might not go all the way through my guitar and halfway into my torso while playing.

I also impulse bought an Arduino. The Arduino is awesome but turning button presses into keyboard strokes isn’t really its main deal. So I ordered an I-PAC VE which is dedicated entirely to simulating keyboard controls.

Step two:

Months later when the I-PAC finally arrived, I wired up the buttons and the board and it all worked on the first try. I made a little cardboard stand for testing:

But it doesn’t look like there’s much testing to do, it’s pretty brain dead easy. I had it entering keystrokes on the computer and triggering clips in Ableton Live within minutes. Windows XP even recognized the I-PAC without any additional drivers, very nice.

Step three:

Where should the buttons go on the guitar? I put some cut-out circles on it to see where they’d fit and be most useful:

This is the layout I’m thinking of right now. There’s a lot to take into consideration, such as:

1. Ease of access while playing (the upper right ones seem close enough I’d be able to hit them with only a brief pause in playing)
2. Staying away from locations where accidental hits are likely (the right side is where my arm is while playing)
3. Making sure I don’t interfere with any of the guitar’s guts
4. Keeping them far enough away from the edge that I don’t weaken and collapse it

Right now I’m wondering if I should try to house the circuit board inside the guitar and run a USB cable from the guitar to my laptop or should I run the wires from the buttons to the external I-PAC which would be by the laptop? I do not know.

David points to this Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable on Amazon. The tags are wonderful. A small sampling:

snake oil (383)
ripoff (338)
waste of money (314)
throwing your money away (287)
unconscionable (267)
stupid (231)
immoral (204)
pure garbage (202)
cheat (191)
denon (50)
harry potter (47)
astronomically dumb (5)
tax on the stupid (5)
as effective as using dog hair (4)
fraud (4)
nonsense (4)
rofl (4)
time space (4)
wizards_made_th is (4)
a fine product indeed (3)
cable (3)
ftl (3)
how do they get through the door with ba… (3)
pt barnum (3)
shameful (3)
wtf (3)
59 inches (2)
audiofool hardware (2)
bogus (2)
corporate taxation of the uneducated (2)
cures cancer (2)
ecstacy godlike troll-killing superwmd u… (2)
eternal life (2)
ether-licious (2)

I’ve had a hate-on for “high-end” cables for a long time so this is wonderful to me. [via Joho]

The borrowed PA in the practice garage went away so I reached into the vast (vast!) Brad Sucks war chest and bought two 270 watt Peavey PR10PN Powered Loudspeakers. Despite forgetting my mixer at home they did a nice job at rehearsal last night. Very clear and full sound, plus I have them up on stands now which I think helps them stand out from the murky low frequencies.

I knew nothing about monitors or live sound before. I did a lot of reading and here uh are some… knowledge:

• People on live sound forums are kind of annoying, possibly worse than recording forums. God forbid you not want to outfit your garage with multiple $1500 JBL’s.
• Powered speakers are now a viable alternative to a powered mixer + passive speakers and offer more flexibility. But they’re newer so they’re hard to find used.
• The Peaveys have optional brackets to position them as floor-wedge monitors.
• The Peaveys actually have three inputs on each speaker. Two quarter inch and one 1/4″/XLR combo. All have level control, which is impressive.
• With powered monitors you can use a regular passive/unpowered mixer, which are cheap and plentiful.

The other point of this was to make it easier to integrate the laptop into the full band, which so far has been a huge struggle technology-wise.

Everything around here’s breaking. The first channel on my Presonus Bluetube magically broke during the night. As you can see, the first channel input is pegged to the max even though there’s nothing plugged into channel 1:

And for the past couple of months I’ve been aware the phantom power light on my Behringer Eurorack UB1204-PRO is always on regardless of the switch setting on the back:

(It’s the red light beside the blue one. Spooky!)

I guess I’ll open up the BlueTube and see if there’s anything obviously wrong inside. Wait, first I’ll shake it.

Update: shaking did nothing. I opened it up and there was nothing broken looking. Poked around a bit and tugged on wires and things, powered it back on and now it works again. La-di-da.

Update 2: It broke again after a couple days of working fine. Presonus says $65 + shipping to repair. Blergh.

There’s a lot of enthusiasm about Guitar Rising — a “real guitar” version of Guitar Hero. Just to be a stick in the mud I’m calling shenanigans: machine parsing guitar playing has been the holy grail of guitar nerds for quite some time. So unless the authors of this game have figured out something that all those folks working on guitar to MIDI translators for the past twenty years have failed to do, it will probably suck ass. And if they have figured that out, why not sell a multi-hundred dollar plugin to guitarists instead?

Holy mother of Christmas I would like one of these Gibson Robot Guitars:

Also please add: unstoppable killing powers.

The GT-8 + Power Engine combo got a tryout in rehearsal last night. Verdict: thumbs up. It was sorta touch and go with levels and patches for a first try, so I don’t think I’ll be using it at tomorrow night’s show, but with some tweaking I think it’ll be a big improvement.

The 60 watt Power Engine puts out more than enough juice to keep up. At only half gain it’s as loud or maybe louder than I ever got my Delta Blues 210 up to (my loudness demands are not very high).

The biggest difference is the amount of tone control available. It’s wonderful and horrifying at the same time — so many choices! Also there’s a fair amount of difference between what the tones sound like at whatever level I can manage in my house and band levels. That’ll take some adjustment — as well as probably me sitting in the garage diddling with settings and being eaten by mosquitos.

Previously beside my desk I had a keyboard stand and my Edirol PCR-50. The Edirol would invariably become covered in papers and garbage which really hampered my workflow. I also bought a second smaller keyboard that I wanted access to as well.

After complaining about it here and multiple trips through IKEA looking for something that would work or be adaptable, I realized I had a much larger table in my basement that I could cut down to my purposes and install a keyboard shelf into.

So after a lot of planning and some nervous work with a table-saw, here’s my new side-table with the keyboard tray retracted:

Here it is with the keyboard tray extended:

The keyboard tray slides were around $36 and the pine board was $10. It works pretty well though I slightly brutalized the board cutting it to fit. I may sand and stain it later but I’m too lazy now.

The keyboard tray works well but I’m sure a better craftsman could have made it less wobbly when pushing it in.

But it does what I want. The large keyboard stays out of sight most of the time and I can’t cover it with junk. The small keyboard is accessible up top and there’s plenty of room on the left side for papers and garbage. Hooray papers and garbage!

As chronicled in my amp search, I went with a Tech 21 Power Engine 60 extension cabinet. Today I had a chance to play with it for an hour and I’m really, really happy with it.

The big drawback of using a regular guitar amplifier with an amp simulator is that regular amps are specifically made to “color” the sound coming out of your guitar. That’s what makes guitars sound awesome. But layering the amp sound on top of your amp simulator results in random muddy crap. You have to constantly be compensating for the sound of your amp when designing your patches on the amp simulator.

The Tech 21 PW60 Power Engine however is more faithful — it puts out what goes into it with minimal coloration. When I switch between headphones and the PW60, the patch sounds are nearly identical (the PW60 has more “air” which seems unavoidable due to physics.)

It’ll be a week before I can try it at rehearsal — which is good because I’ve got some patch programming to do — but I can easily get the PW60 up to volumes I’m sure my neighbors can hear without even putting the gain at 50%.

It’s slim on features, which I like as opposed to Behringer’s habit of throwing shitty digital effects processors in anywhere they can. Three EQ tone controls, gain control, handy XLR in and out and of course 1/4″ in. Mine didn’t come with an AC power cable but I’m not sure if that’s Tech 21′s fault or the music store. I have lots around so it was no big deal.

It’s lightweight (33 pounds) and nice looking. It’s smaller than my Delta Blues 210 so I guess I’m less of a man now.

All in all, I’m very happy with it, five thumbs up.

I’ve wanted to ditch my Peavey Delta Blues 210 for a while but what to replace it with has been an issue. The 210 is a great amp but running my digital amp sim into its tubey goodness is basically dumb (and a huge hassle in patch-tuning).

Ideally I’d like to not lug an amp around with me and go straight to the PA but the few sound guys I asked about this seemed terrified by the idea. They said they’d probably run my amp sim into a monitor and mic that just to be safe. So I guess I should still have an amp that I can control.

Looking around the bossgtcentral.com forums lead me in the direction of keyboard amplifiers like the Roland KC-350 and Behringer K3000FX. Keyboard amps of any decent power and quality are expensive (the KC-350 is $600+ here) and they get quite heavy.

Somewhere I stumbled across the Tech 21 Power Engine PW60 extension cab: 

The Tech 21 Power Engine 60 is an open-backed 1×12, 60W powered extension cab designed to be used with the Trademark 60. It is not a standalone piece; however, it can be combined with any discrete bass preamp. You don’t have to tweak your usual settings or presets. Just plug into the Power Engine and go. It has a level control, 3-band active tone control, 1/4″ input, and balanced XLR input and output. You can daisy-chain any number of Power Engine 60s together for the really big gigs.

Regardless of what it’s intended for, it’s been embraced by amp sim users. The Harmony Central reviews are glowing. “Clear”, “clean”, “flat”, “loud”, all very promising. Also it only costs $380 Canadian, weighs in at a svelte 33 pounds and if I decide to go for stereo I could grab another one without too much hassle.

I’ve ordered one and it should be here tonight, I’m hoping I should be able to make that cash back selling the Peavey if it’s all good.