Although this site is poorly designed, the content is so orginal and unique that I had to mention it here. Most of the tools and drum machines are flash so you really have to check it out for yourself. Can be fun to play around with, might be even more fun to bust out the guitar and against some homemade drum beats.
Check out the virtual drum machines or their home page.
After reading this article on Yahoo about ‘Guitar Hero II’, I couldn’t help but snicker a little especially after this:
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?
This just in, you don’t need to sign a recording contract to distribute your music any more. In fact it’s the corporations that are chargin you a “listening tax”. Bob Ostertag rages against the mass media music machine in this scathing article on Alternet. A great read if you want to understand how it all works and the potential with the net for it to change.
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.
Last night I was able to get this site updated and running. The 2 biggest features that have been added are the chord section now contians over 1800 chord diagrams. Most types of chords have 8 different inversions. The other major update I did was adding some forums, as I was getting alot of email and unfortunately don’t have time to respond to it all, I figured alot of things people were asking or writing about could easily just be posted in a forum…thereby opening up the flood gates to see if they can get a response from someone out there that has experience with the guitar type stuff other than myself, it will be interesting to see for me at least if anything interesting comes of that.
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.
