Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that’s coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:

About a year ago, I wrote about boutique synthesizers – fantastically obscure boxes hand-made by freaks (normally Scandinavian). Compared with synths, effects pedals are relatively simple — sometimes just a handful of components, a switch and a couple of knobs in a steel box — so there are loads of people experimenting and making great-looking but expensive pedals for guitarists. Most of the pedals mentioned here are in the $350-$500 range. Sure, that would buy you a dozen Chinese-made Behringer pedals, but would that make you happy?

Zvex Ringtone
Disappointingly, Zachary Vex’s new Ringtone pedal won’t make your vintage strat sound like the Crazy Frog. Instead, it’s a 8-step sequencer driving a ring modulator — the early sound effect used to make the voice of the Daleks, and built into the Commodore 64′s SID sound effects chip. It’s pretty hard to understand what the Ringtone does, or why it’s cool, without watching Zachary’s wonderful demo video. Like all boutique pedals, the Ringtone is crazy expensive at $349, but that gets you a hand-made, hand-painted pedal.

After the break: Kitsch Brazilian pedals, butch American pedals, clever English pedals, and a fuzzbox with a joystick…

MG Pedals
Marcelo Giangrande makes MG pedals (and a cool little range of amps) in Sao Paolo, Brazil. His bright pink “That’s Echo Folks” pedal is an analog delay controlled by a light-sensitive sensor on a tail.

BugBrand
In Bristol, England, Tom Bugs makes a big range of lo-fi sound mangling devices. His Mini-Modular is a little slope-fronted box full of circuits to modify other sounds, or create them from scratch. It’s also a synth, but don’t expect it to play in tune. His Bug Crusher is a stompbox which uses an analog process to roughly reproduce the bit-reduced sound of old samplers and circuit-bent toys.

Trogotronic
While MG gear is kitsch and colourful, Trogotronic’s stuff is butch: Huge, custom-modified all-tube signal generators and effects, and the Iron Cross, a bombproof arcade joystick turned into a four-way signal router.

Guyatone Optical
Guyatone pedals are a little less underground than the others featured here – they’re made in Japan in a factory, rather than someone’s garage – but they make up for it through over-engineered complexity and an exuberant number of lights, switches and controls. Their Ultron filter pedal even has old-school DIP switches inside for further tweaking.

Schumann Electronics
In the back room of a music store in Brooklyn, John Schumann builds pedals for bands like Portishead and Radiohead. His pedals are fantastically esoteric, like the PLL: an “analog harmonizer” which plays along with the notes you’re playing.

Effector 13
While most pedals are aimed a guitarists, the Effector 13 Synth Mangler is designed for keyboard players. It’s two channels of ultra-fuzz, controlled by a joystick and a “magic eye” light sensor.

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Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:

One of the first columns I ever wrote for Engadget was about Triple Neck Guitars, which are normally played by heavy metal guitarists with curly perms and an enthusiasm for lengthy solos. Now, straight outta the Mathematics department of a Canadian university, comes the Tritare: A guitar with three necks, but only six strings.

Last week, at the Acoustical Society of America's 151st meeting in Providence, RI, Sophie Léger of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Université de Moncton, Canada, presented a paper on "A New Family of Stringed Musical Instruments".

She's one of the inventors of the Tritare. It has triple-ended strings - one string goes up the fretted neck, and the other two resonate on the second, and third, fretless necks (which the guitar is standing on in this picture). You play it roughly like a normal guitar, with the two necks down to your right.

Obviously, the interesting bit is the sound, and this page contains several samples, which are amazing. Presumably they're uneffected, but sound alternately like bells or reverb-covered 'Paris Texas' slide guitar.

The Canadial professors are trying to market the Tritare as a product -- there's a homepage at Tritare.com, but absent are prices or availability. They're also experimenting with networks of strings, which at the moment are more at the clanking and atonal end of things.

Of course, if three necks doesn't sound hardcore enough, you could always build a double body guitar.

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Peripherals, Portable Audio

If it wasn’t yet clear to you that the age of the DIY mashup is upon us, a new set of toys from a company called BlueBox — which let even iPod-toting tweens “enhance” their tunes by dropping beats and sound effects — should remove any lingering doubts. The three members of the new miJam series, which all attach to standard headpone jacks – a guitar, mixing board, and electronic drumsticks — bear little resemblance to  their non-toy counterparts, as all of the effects are triggered by buttons instead of real drumming or thrashing. Even the mixer sounds like it would be a letdown for budding DJ’s, delivering canned scratches that will in no way prepare them for the beat-matching they’ll being doing in a few years on their Numarks. Still, kids are pretty easily entertained, so the flashing lights and loud noises should probably hold their interest for a few minutes longer than your average gimmicky accessory. Like so many other pre-release products we bring you, we have no idea when these are coming out nor how much they’ll sell for.

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Filed under: Portable Audio

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Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets, Home Entertainment

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Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets

The acoustic guitar has been an expressive, versatile instrument for centuries, but it's always lacked even a basic selection of cheesy drum kits and auto-rhythms. Now engineers in the Czech Republic have taken an acoustic guitar, covered the wooden top with a plastic touch membrane, and put little switches all over the neck. The version of the Stones 'Honky Tonk Women' played on this monstrosity has to be heard to be believed.
Presumably, there's a lot of skill that goes into building and painting a violin which resembles a leg of fine Serrano Spanish ham, but the luthier who created this instrument is unable to answer one simple question. Why?

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