11.07.11
The You Don’t Rock Guitar
I hate plutocracy gadget freak news, the shoe-shiners who e-mail it to all their buddies and the people who write it.
Today’s case in point, some New York Times swell, David Pogue, writing about a thing called the You Rock guitar.
“You Rock, you rock,” he concludes after 1000 or so words extolling it.
Essentially, it’s a guitar synthesizer made of plastic, one you can port right to the computer.
Let’s have a look at the mistakes he makes:
Into the intersection of these trends comes a fascinating, one-of-a-kind new instrument called the You Rock guitar ($200) from Inspired Instruments.
Its solid plastic body is small and not as heavy as wood, but much more substantial than the hollow plastic that most Guitar Hero heroes are used to.
You play real steel strings with your right hand. But they’re only six inches long; they don’t continue up the neck. Instead, your left fingers, on the neck, press what turn out to be only touch sensors.
Since the You Rock can get its power from four AA batteries, it’s an incredibly portable and private practice instrument. You can play when you’re in a rowboat, up in a tree, next to a sleeping partner — all places where ordinary electric guitars would fear to tread.
And you’re not just carrying around one guitar; you’re carrying 100. The You Rock is a full-blown synthesizer. It can sound like a gentle nylon-string acoustic, a rich 12-string folk guitar, a screaming heavy-metal ax — even an organ or a string section.
Electric guitars went portable on AA batteries a long time ago. I’ve attached a pic of a Korg Pandora — mine — a processor that runs on two AA batteries, one that pumps earbud and can make your electric sound like Keith Emerson with ELP at the Isle of Wight, or “a rich 12 string folk guitar. You get the idea. It’s around five years old.
Third, there’s You Rock mode. The guitar’s control panel (colorful square buttons on the top edge) contains 25 song loops — a professional backup band laying down grooves for you. It’s great fun, and great practice, to play along. There’s also an audio input so that you can play along with music from your iPod or another source.
Been done. Everyone has a pocket amp you can plug you iCrap into nowadays.
For example, the You Rock can connect to GarageBand for the iPad. Can you imagine? An entire multitrack recording studio now fits into a backpack.
Lots of multi-track recording studio kit already fits into a backpack.That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do anything listenable with it. Often, quite the contrary. And there is something to be said for a real studio.
Now, I’m a musician, but not a guitarist.
One of my old Korg Pandoras. A rock band/rehearsal tool in a box.
A newer model, made to also be a sound card for any computer. One version of the Pandora was a 4-track studio that recorded to a small removable data chip.
The Pandoras come with bunches of preset tone applications, for making you sound like an arena-rocker.
Here’s an old recording — The Heevahava Overture — in which all the tones come from the Pandora, including the drums, the bass and me playing the guitar to imitate “Mr. Keith Emerson!” I originally made it as a tongue-firmly-in-cheek demonstrator of what the thing could do in a few minutes.
It’s three years old. Be a nuisance and send this link to Mr. Pogue.
It’s worth noting there’s a certain physical pleasure that comes from playing an acoustic or electric guitar. It’s a nerves in the fingers, hands, touchy-feely, sensory satisfaction kind of thing. The device reviewed in the New York Times apparently goes to some length to defeat that.
It’s also worth mentioning that having your stuff profiled in the New York Times by some heevahava is better than being given a gold brick.
Nice job, get crap for free because of where you work and then make the company that gave it to ya really happy.
Mikey said,
November 7, 2011 at 2:13 pm
> nerves in the fingers, hands, touchy-feely, sensory satisfaction [snip]
Probably helps to explain why so much commercial music now sounds so sterile to me. Probably also helps to explain why someone can pick up your guitar and sound nothing like you. I’ll take a raw garage band cover over a polished studio note surgery auto-tune rendition most of the time these days, thank you.
If it’s the same guy, David Pogue used to write for Macworld way back when…I remember his byline from those magazines; virtually the only thing laying around to amuse ourselves with when work was slack and we were hiding in the art studio of the (long gone) graphics department, the only place our boss never thought to look for us. How’s that for a run-on sentence? Howard would be proud…
George Smith said,
November 7, 2011 at 3:53 pm
Hah. This is only one place where Howard and I would agree. This toy is lame.