If you come across any problems or there is some alternative tuning that should be added as default please let me know by posting a comment below. You can also download a free mini bass widget to put on your website, profile page or blog.

I’ve been sick all week, and was surfing the net, I came across this awesome video from talking heads today and thought I would share it. For some reason it really reminds me of Modest Mouse. Especially all the cool effects towards the end.

Here are the improvements I’ve made on the old one:

• 8x higher quality sound files
• mutiple guitar sounds including Clean Electric, Classical Acoustic, Distorted Electice and Steel String Accoustic
• still has custom mode and some default tunings – you can use all the new sounds with these modes
• you can customize the settings including:
  • auto advance – you need 2 hands to tune a guitar so this will automatically advance through the notes without having to click buttons each time
  • note delay – the time between the sounds
  • note repeat – how many times you’d like the note to repeat before it plays the next one or if your not in auto advance mode the sound will stop after this many times
  • default tuning mode – this will load your favorite tuning when you visit howtotuneaguitar.org
  • default sound – this will load your favorite guitar sound when you visiit howtotuneaguitar.org

I hope that this tuner will work for everyone. You can check it out here.

If you have problems with it or feedback please leave me a message below.

If you end up trying it out, drop me a line and let me know how it goes for you. Because wireless devices are kind of all over the place it will be interesting to know what works and what doesn’t.

I did make a back up simple tuner that should work on any wireless device…

You can select whether you want to find new or used gear as well you can also compare different prices for different instruments.

It would be a really good tool even just to research gear before you start going out to stores if you prefer to buy locally and in-person.

Feel free to add this anywhere… It’s probably the smallest guitar tuner you will ever find.

Gibson said the games, in which players press buttons on a guitar-shaped controller in time with notes on a TV screen, violates a 1999 patent for technology to simulate a musical performance.

Read the full article at Reuters.com

• A wicked live Subway Performance, I love stuff like this; so awesome to fill a public space with good music or art. A boring daily grind it out ride the subway home day becomes an experience.
• A whole bunch of tabs that are sure to be really great judging by past work from Heartwoodguitar.com – if you feel like learning a song tonight check out that list, there will likely be something you like on it.
• A really unique guitar by Ken Butler.

In the wasteland of the music business, hundreds of truckloads of CDs wind up every year in the landfill. How does this happen? For starters, the practice is to manufacture in bulk, regardless of sales viability, because it’s cheaper. If half of the units manufactured actually ship to retail, a big chunk of those — perhaps half again — may end up coming back to the warehouse anyway. ‘

Add to this pile the promotional copies, many of which don’t even exit the shrink-wrap before getting chucked in the bin by whatever totally uninterested executive or editor they’ve been sent to… Well, that’s a mountain of plastic. A recent report in the U.K. Guardian claims that one million unsold copies of Robbie Williams’ last CD Rudebox will be shipped to China to be crushed (and hopefully used for road-surfacing). Dealing with product waste like this reportedly costs EMI millions of dollars a year.

Read full article…

Guitar Rising was recently unveiled at the Independent Game Conference in Austin, TX. At the conference’s Game Demo Night, players – both guitar newbies and hobbyists alike – strapped on a real electric guitar and fretted and strummed their way though introductory and skilled game levels. Unlike games like Guitar Hero, where gamers use a small fake plastic guitar, this one actually requires the gamer to use a real guitar. Check out the cheesy video ad below.

If your still “old skool” like myself you can still use a web based tuner. ;)

That is the question Radiohead is asking you. When you visit the site for their newest album In Rainbows, you decide the price you pay to download the album.

You can also order the disc box, which costs 40 pounds and includes extra material. Currently the album is only available from their website.

Thom Yorke reportedly told TIME, “I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one. And, yes, it probably would give us some perverse pleasure to say ‘F___ you’ to this decaying business model.”

And the record executives are starting to clue in as well:

“This feels like yet another death knell,” emailed an A&R executive at a major European label. “If the best band in the world doesn’t want a part of us, I’m not sure what’s left for this business.”

Are these large record labels soon to be a thing of the past?

Let’s hope so. ;)

Read full article.

What’s next? Are they gonna charge you for whistling a tune, or what about all those guitar instructors and musicians out there that play music, is someone going to hunt them down and make them pay royalties everytime they strum a chord?

I imagine this shadowy underground world, outside of the net, where wild men roam free and play popular cover songs without paying a dime in royalties…

Though I don’t think a little pastic device will ever surpass the real tone of a finely built guitar, it might be fun to have one of these and play around with it. To me it looks more useful then Guitar Hero.

Curb’s Becky Judd says that the fact that the guitar was secured with concrete and locked down didn’t deter the thief. “Unfortunately, whoever took it managed to cut the lock and break the guitar from the stand,” Judd says. “I only hope they didn’t damage the guitar.”

A reward is being offered for any information leading to the return of the guitar. How do you steal a 10 foot high guitar and perhaps more importantly, what do you do with it?

Check out the virtual drum machines or their home page.

In reality, all you’re doing is pressing a combination of buttons at just the right moment. But the fact that you’re standing up, wailing away on a toy guitar adds to the immersive quality.

And I thought to myself, the only thing better would be to actually sit and play a real guitar! Made of wood!

I am not an avid video game player. On the rare occasion I have been known to sit around a friend’s house on a saturday night playing video games, but most of the time it was just because we were to hung over to do anything else…

Ever played this?

It kind of reminded me of an old Hunter S. Thompson quote,

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

Here are a couple of quotes from the article:

“Record companies used to charge a fee for making it possible for people to listen to recorded music. Now their main function is to prohibit people from listening to music unless they pay off these corporations.”

“Or to put it slightly differently, they used to provide you with the tools you needed to hear recorded music. Now they charge you for permission to use tools you already have, that they did not provide, that in fact you paid someone else for. Really what they are doing is imposing a ‘listening tax’…”

“Really what they are doing is imposing a “listening tax.” Like all taxes, if you don’t pay you are breaking the law; you are a criminal! Armed agents of the state have shown up at private residences and taken teenagers away in handcuffs for failure to pay this corporate tax.”

Bob Ostertag is a “composer, performer, historian, instrument builder, journalist, activist, and kayak instructor ­” who has published “21 CDs of music, two movies, two DVDs, and two books”. You can check out his website here.

Also I moved the guitar tuner to the home page, if your looking for it.

PS, This post is mainly here because I needed something in this section, but will try to add something daily, okay probably weekly that is half interesting to other guitarists out there to this section, possibly not all guitar related, but mostly.

Happy Surfing.