Jack Conte is an absolutely amazing musician with lots of technical chops. In this remix video he rips up Doin’ It Right by Daft Punk using the QuNeo and a series of robot fingers, projectors, and other gear to build an amazing performance.

He also did this amazing song, Pedals, all by himself using some robots built by friends and all of his impressive pedal collection. Excellent work.

The premise is simple – you tune your guitar and then play notes or chords. The app (which runs on a phone or your browser) senses your strum and lets you move on or asks you to repeat the notes. You do this, ad infinitum, until you get good. The app gives you feedback as you play, offering pointers, and you can move from basic G-C-D strumming patterns to, say, more complex folks songs. As a self-taught guitarist, I could see how having an app to simply say if your Am chord sounds like a buzzing mess is valuable.

I tried the app yesterday with an acoustic and it immediately picked up my chording and plucks. It was easy enough for a beginner – the chord patterns are clearly denoted on the screen – and I could definitely see it as an alternative to light up guitars like Fretlight and Gtar.

Kobi Stok built the app using a number of “polyphonic algorithms” to identify chords and notes. He is a gigging musician in Tel Aviv and worked for SAP prior to this project. They’ve raised $800,000 from seed investors including Jeff Pulver and the Micro Angel Fund.

“We’ve recently partnered with leading educational music publishing company, Alfred, to secure the rights to leading music catalogs from the likes of Led Zeppelin, Green Day, Foo Fighters, Muse, R.E.M., Evanescence and others. With this amazing partnership we were recently able to launch real lessons for top hits,” said Assaf Bivas, JamStar’s marketing head. The company has also signed a partnership with Dean guitars to create Dean signature lessons.

The service makes money by selling various lessons including Rock/Pop and Jazz/Blues standards. “We have musicians on staff who tailor make the lessons to fit with progress and experience our user base brings to the table. Our sole purpose, is to teach you guitar in the best possible way,” said Bivas.

The app is available now for Android and iOS and you can play it for free in your browser.

The app came to be when Stok noticed his friends playing Guitar Hero and learning nothing from the experience. The app, in turn, acts as sort of a “real” guitar hero. By listening to how you play and responding with almost no latency, JamStar gives you a helpful look at how bad you sound.

Using “bone conduction” the Neptune resonates the audio signal off the cheekbones of the swimmer instead of using the normal “air conduction” of the ear canal. It holds 4 GB of audio and is available for 159.99 at the finisinc.com

The only question I have is whether or not the music signal can be heard by other swimmers, in the adjacent lane. If they can, you might get some dirty looks for jamming out your Lady Gaga or death metal tracks during public swim.

[Thanks Pocket-lint]

This fascinating custom guitar made for John Lennon by VOX in 1966 sold for a whopping $408,000 at a Julien’s auction hosted in New York City last week. The prototype hollow body was used by Lennon (and also George Harrison) during the filming of some of the sequences that made up the group’s ill-fated Magical Mystery Tour video (maybe not their greatest work).

The ornate wood work and cutaways certainly echo the late sixties era of design, but the car stereo-style push button tone selectors are probably my favorite feature. It brings to mind guitars made by Teisco or Hagstrom — but probably with more durability.

In any event, the guitar sold to an unidentified buyer from the USA.

[via The Telegraph]

Costing $29.99 and $39.99, respectively, both stands are available for both the 7 or 9 inch form factors.

The iKlip 2 and iKlip Studio tablets are available at IK Multimedia’s website.

I was lucky enough to get Incident Tech’s new gTar, a MIDI/DSP-based guitar that is perfect for both teaching and composition. The guitar, with the current software and feature set, isn’t quite the shredder’s dream – yet – but as a teaching system it’s excellent and I found it quite playable both “live” and while recording MIDI music.

To be clear, this is not an electric guitar with built-in pickups. You can’t plug it into an amp and go all Van Halen on your basement without an iPhone or iPod. Instead, the guitar outputs MIDI signals for each string and fret and can either connect directly to an app like Garage Band or Logic or you can connect it to an amp via the headphone-out jack. The gTar also has a series of embedded LEDs in the neck and, using your iPhone or iPod, you can play along to a preset number of open source and licensed songs. A free play mode turns the iPod into a mini amp with multiple instruments and a custom light show maker.

Read More…

The biggest difference between the previous version is obviously that it is smaller. There also appears to be a little more care added to make sure that tablets of all shapes and sizes fit as snuggly and securely as their iOS counterparts.

In fact the, the claw handle at the bottom that holds the tablet actually has a notch specific to the iPad Mini, while other, thicker tablets can use the entire claw handle.

The rubber feet grip flat surfaces quite well. You have to push on it pretty hard to get it to move at all.

I’ve used the original iKlip Studio on many occasions and find it to be a fine stand. While it may not have the stylings and panache of some of the other carved-wood or otherwise highly stylized stands out there, the iKlip Studio works just as well and is quite affordable at $29.00

I don’t want to go crazy over it — it is, after all, a stand. But it’s as good of one as you will find for 29 bucks and easily fits in a backpack.

More info is available at the IK Multimedia website.

Now you can enjoy the comforts of the company’s audio response from the safer, more control-able distance of a pair of headphones. You could still probably use the headphones to induce tinnitis too though, if that’s what you’re into.

To accompany their Major and Minor brands of headphones, Marshall has now added the Monitor to the category in order to deliver “THE POWER AND STRENGTH THAT IS MARSHALL IN A HEADPHONE WITH HI-FI PROWESS AND EPIC SOUND.”

Old-school looks meet contemporary features (like microphone, remote, and detachable cables and foldable design) in this distinctive set of over-the-ear headphones that would look good on the cover of any Matthew Sweet LP Cover.

Additionally, the headphones also sport the new Marshall F.T.F system of loudness control. The system includes special inserts that can be placed over the speakers that help modify the sound to be either “laid back and warm” or “brighter and clearer”. Interesting approach.

They are $200.00 and available at a pretty slickly designed website.

Not sure how they sound yet or if they match up to the hype they have described in their  literature, but if looks are the most important thing to you (and let’s be honest, that’s a big part of Rock and Roll), these might do the trick at letting you get your “mod” on.

Comes with a canvas carrying pouch.

I know it is an inevitability, but I can’t wait until I see some one mic-ing one of these up at an open mic gig somewhere.

More info at Kickstarter.

My only gripe with them at all is that when you are wearing glasses or sun glasses, the headphones can eventually apply a bit of pressure on your ears and become a tad uncomfortable. Because of this, I am pleased to see their evolution to an in-ear model called Jax In-Ear.

New features include:

• i2 Sound Engines – drivers that are supposed to deliver solid bass yet clear highs.
• Flat, tangle-free cable.
• Four sizes of ear tips.
• Mic + Music Control – three-button remote lets you adjust the volume, skip music and answer/hang-up calls. Built in mic lets you answer calls.

At $39.99, there’s not much risk here. That’s about the same price as regular iPhone headphones. Probably worth a try.

[via Gizmodo]