This video is a quick overview of the GarageBand interface.

With your laptop and GarageBand it will only take a minute or two to set up your computer to record your guitar music. You can add echo or any other effects after recording.

You can edit and overdub with GarageBand. You can also play loops and beats.

With a Windows based computer you can find plenty of free software for recording your music. The most obvious choice is Audacity Audacity is an open-source audio editing platform that’s very easy to use. This video explores how to set-up your preferences and start recording audio.

Incoming search terms for the article:

• free software for recording guitar on computer (1)
• guitar to computer (1)
• how to overdub in garageband (1)
• how to record a guitar (1)
• overdub in garageband (1)
• record acoustic guitar on Apple computer (1)

Bear in mind that the idea behind guitar effects is to make your guitar sound better and have more authority and kick-buttle than it would have straight out of the box.

Guitar Rig 3 by Native Instruments is one of the most highly thought of guitar effects programs. It is not free but you can download a demo and play around with it for half an hour. Bass and guitar effects are produced by imitating classic amplifiers, microphones, pedals and cabinets. Guitar Rig 3 has authentic sounding pedals and stomp boxes, bass cabinets and mikes. You have the pleasurable task of mixing your sound with the programs drag and drop interface.

PitchWorks DX 1.2 is a plug-in which allows the adjustment of a music sample’s pitch or tempo, or you can change pitch AND tempo. For accurate tempo change and avoid artifacts an accuracy parameter is available. All parameters possess two tweak modes: draft, in which you can tweak parameters quickly with GUI wheels and precise mode, where you input precise values into edit boxes.

Guitar FX is the guitar effects program for the guitarist with no money and an old desk-top computer. This program hasn’t had any development for a long time but it will give a great variety of sounds with very little training.

A more up-to-date free program is Audacity. This is an open source program for any operating system known to man. The built-in effects include phaser, wah-wah, reverse and echo. You can change tapes and vinyl discs to digital recordings or CDs, record your own live audio and edit a range of sound files. You can make your own multi track recordings using a mike or line-in. You can also change your pitch without changing the tempo and you can get rid of any pesky hum, hiss or random coughing noises. The guitar player has at his disposal a mountain of effects like bass boost, equalization and FFT filter.

Here is a video on some guitar effects of a different kind . . .

Technorati Tags: guitar effects

The guitar composer can import his tabs from other formats like ASCII or MIDI or enter his music by playing it on the computer’s MIDI. Alternatively you can use the mouse to play it on Guitar Pro’s fretboard or by simply using the computer keyboard.

Guitar Pro has an interface that lets you view your composition to best advantage, displaying any number or tracks and scrolling vertically or horizontally. You can switch from tab to music notation and back, of if you can’t read music, you can hear what your music sounds like. You can keep track of where the music is up to while it plays using the moving cursor.

If you are a new guitarist trying to get a repertoire together, you will be needing some kind of tool to help you learn solos fast. Guitar Pro’s advantage for the beginner guitar player is that it will import music in other formats and play it back at any speed you want. You can even loop a guitar solo and have it play slower each time the loop restarts. What makes Guitar Pro really good for the newbie is that so many other people use it and share their tabs on the net. You will find thousands of popular songs already formatted for you to learn.

Guitar Pro includes some other useful tools for the guitarist. The chord diagram generator shows you all chords known to mankind and inserts any chord you want into your music. You can also listen to a wide range of scales in the program and view them on the fretboard. You can also tune your guitar using the built-in tuners.

If you want to know how to use guitar Pro you will need to be able to read guitar tab. If you do not know how to read tab, don’t worry, the manual tells you how. It also tells you how to read rhythm notation so that you can learn to follow the rhythm of a song on the screen without having to hear it to know what it sounds like.

Incoming search terms for the article:

• guitar pro slide guitar (1)
• how to use guitar pro (1)
• import songs to guitar pro (1)
• learn how to use the guitar pro (1)
• using guitar pro (1)
• what does guitar pro do? (1)

Technorati Tags: how to use the Guitar Pro guitar tab editor

This tutorial is meant to give you a start on connecting your guitar to your computer, so if you are in a rush to hear your playing and you don’t care too much about the sound quality, I will get to you first and go onto more audio-friendly solutions later.

Once you have decided on how you are going to connect your guitar to your computer you will want to know how to record your guitar playing. For quick checks to see if you have connected everything up properly, the built-in recorder on your computer will do the job. You will find that you have severely limited recording time on this little application so you will need to download something more substantial from the web. Audacity is a good free sound editor. There is a tutorial here and a bunch of video tutorials on YouTube.

While I am talking about installing new programs, you could do a search for an audio mixer program. Some are free and they all come with some features to change how your guitar sounds.

If you are new to recording your guitar on your computer, start by plugging a microphone into the pink microphone socket. Put your microphone in front of your guitar or amplifier and play.

If you have a guitar with a pickup and you don’t like the way your guitar sounds through the microphone, plug the guitar into the mike socket. Or plug the guitar into the blue line-in socket on your computer with a cable made for this job. You can buy one at an electronics store.

You will now notice an improvement in audio quality but it still could do with some improvement. So my next suggestion is to buy a better sound card than the one that your computer came with. Another solution is to buy something called an external sound card. The sound card plugs into the USB port on your computer and will give you a better quality of sound. If you are using a computer that doesn’t have a line-in socket, the external sound card will solve that problem, too.

You will find that the brochures for guitar amp simulators use terms like “crafting”, “shaping” and “modelling”. The AmpliTube 2, apart from giving the world a nifty pun on “amplitude”, offers us the chance for “crafting the ultimate guitar tone”. Whoopty-doo. What that means is you use the program to make variations on installed amp simulations, to produce your own tone. Their are five modules which include tuner, stomp, amp head, miked cabinet, and rack effects, on two series/parallel guitar rigs. fourteen preamps and equalizers, seven power amps, sixteen cabinets, six microphones, twenty-one stomp effects, and eleven rack effects. The company says we get all the gear to create twenty thousand amp combinations. The general consensus amongst guitar players who have tried this software is that it is the best available.

SimulAnalog Guitar Suite simulates:

Boss DS-1 (Distortion stompbox)
Boss SD-1 (Super Overdrive stompbox)
Tube Screamer (Overdrive stompbox)
Oberheim PS-1 (Phaser stompbox)
Univox Univibe (Modulations stompbox)
Fender Twin 1969 (Guitar amplifier)
Marshall JCM900 Dual Reverb (Guitar amplifier)

The major claim to uniqueness of this simulator software is that we cannot tell it apart from the sound of the original equipment. The other thing is it is free. The program is the result of a bunch of boffins developing a set of effects plugins that musicians could obtain and play around with without any great effort.

Here is another product name thought up by a punster – ReValver. It is made by Peavey who also makes real-world guitar amps. The Mark III model gives us fifteen sought after amplifiers in one little box. The ReValver claims to capture the “true sonic nature” of vacuum tubes. Some guitarists feel that this program has some extra flexibility in the range of individual simulations you can come up with, although it is fairly expensive.

Another free guitar amp simulator is Voxengo Boogex which has a range of sound shaping features. Using Boogex you can get heavy distorted sound or slight distortion. Boogex is also able to apply any speaker cabinet impulse response, and it comes with several example factory presets.

Reaper, according to the company blurb, is a “fully featured multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment”. This program has quite a low price ticket and many guitarists love it. It includes VST guitar amp simulators and effects. When it operated in real time, many guitar players feel that it is like plugging into a real effects pedal.

Drum loops: If you import a loop as an audio file (instead of MIDI), Reaper can create loops by simply dragging the right (or left) edge to expand the length of the audio clip. In this way you can for example, take a 4 measure loop and stretch it out over an entire song.

Incoming search terms for the article:

• reaper guitar effects (3)
• vst guitar amp simulator (3)
• Computer guitar amp affects (2)
• computer guitar effect programs (2)
• guitar amp computer program (2)
• reaper metal guitar vst (2)
• acoustic amp simulator (2)
• reaper amp models (1)
• real time software guitar amp effect (1)
• rack amp simulator (1)
• marshall amp VST (1)
• marshall amp simulator free download (1)
• How to Select Guitar effects (1)
• how to create a software guitar amp (1)
• guitar stompbox simulator (1)
• guitar effects for reaper (1)
• guitAR effects computer (1)
• guitar amp terms (1)
• guitar amp racks (1)
• ultimatre guitar amplitude (1)
• reaper and acoustic electric guitars (1)
• twelve string guitar effects software (1)
• stompbox amp simulator (1)
• software guitar amp simulator (1)
• simulanalog vs revalver (1)
• Simulanalog guitar suite presets (1)
• select your effect (1)
• revalver amp simulator (1)
• vst amp for acoustic guitar (1)
• reaper guitar rack (1)
• vst guitar stompboxes (1)
• vst vintage marvin (1)
• reaper factory effects presets (1)
• reaper guitar amp models (1)
• great guitar sound with reaper (1)
• Fretboard simulator (1)
• best vst guitar amp (1)
• best guitar vst (1)
• best guitar effects software (1)
• best guitar amp simulator (1)
• best guitar amp rack simulator (1)
• best amp vst (1)
• best amp simulators (1)
• bass computer amp imulators (1)
• amplitude guitar blues (1)
• amplitude amp simulator (1)
• amplitude amp guitar (1)
• all around electric guitar amp sim (1)
• acoustic guitar simulator (1)
• acoustic amp guitar vst free (1)
• computer guitar amp download (1)
• computer guitar amp simulator (1)
• fretboard reaper (1)
• free real time guitar amp download (1)
• free marshall amp simulator (1)
• Free Guitar VST (1)
• free guitar amp simulators (1)
• free computer guitar effects programs (1)
• free computer guitar amp software (1)
• free computer guitar amp (1)
• electric guitar effects software (1)
• effects pedal acoustic guitar vst (1)
• does reaper have guitar effects (1)
• computer guitar programs (1)
• computer guitar amp software (1)
• acoustic amps simulator (1)

If you want to play electric guitar in your home with all the effects you need plus some vintage guitar amps, many guitar players swear by “Guitar Rig” by Native Instruments. Guitar Rig is and amplifier and effects emulator that has a foot controller with an assignable expression pedal. It will give you distorted sounds and clean sounds with many modulation possibilities. Any enthusiastic electric guitar student should download the trial version of this software and fool around with it. You will learn alot. You can play your guitar using simulations of some classic amps with simulated cabinets and simulated distortion pedals to satisfy your curiosity about guitar software and the various effects available.

As for teaching software, Guitar Method Version 4 is supposed to be the most popular CD-ROM for novice guitarists in the world. It contains well over one hundred-and-fifty lessons including over fifty videos which cover the complete spectrum of learning how to play guitar. You will learn all the exciting stuff like power chords, strumming patterns, finger-picking and riffs. You can practice playing any song at any tempo using the variable speed MIDI tracks. If you want to learn to read sheet music you can, or you can take the course using tabs. You also get an automatic tuner, a metronome and a chord dictionary.

If you are interested in guitar teaching software compare Guitar Method 4 with Teach Yourself To Play Guitar and Interactive Guitar. Teach Yourself to Play Guitar by Alfred Publishing gives you the basics needed to become a real guitarist without taking expensive lessons. You get to learn chords and scales, how to read tabs and music from several different genres. Interactive Guitar by SOS Network claims it will teach you to “think musically”. You can compare your playing with some samples and with the program’s virtual fretboard you can see the names of the notes and fingering.

For chord software chordAlchemy by tonalAlchemy is the top of the range. It allows you to see what chord you are playing. You can generate variations on chords, add a bass note or eliminate the root note. As you make changes to chords the program generates the revised diagram. You can print or play any chord you generate. chordAlchemy combines sophisticated technology with ease of use for people who do not consider themselves computer-minded.

A long list of software with their various advantages will just wear you out so I have listed what many guitar players consider to be the top programs. Now that you have some idea of what guitar software contains you should be able to choose much more easily.

The guitar software approach certainly moves you along. If you are teaching yourself to play the guitar without any timetable or goals you will have a good time learning at your own pace but until you try the systematic approach to learning to play guitar you will not be aware of how you are holding yourself back. So if you decide to use software to learn how to play the guitar, here are the basic elements to look for: a tuner, a metronome and a chord dictionary. Technology to slow down audio and video without altering the pitch of the music is commonplace now so do not get any program that does not include this feature. High quality video lessons should be a given and audio should be real musicians playing real guitars, not midi files.

Starting at the top of the range, Guitar Method Version 4.0 is the best of the softwares available if that is the direction you want to go in. The program will take you from nowhere to guitar player as painlessly as possible by taking you through some basic well-known songs. You honestly do not need to know anything to get started, but it will take you step by step to show you everything you need to learn to play the guitar. The songs are fairly basic to begin with, but they teach you everything you need to move on to more interesting songs, like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” or “Ode to Joy”. You need to have a guitar, but apart from that, everything you need is right there including an easy to use digital tuner, a chord dictionary, a metronome, and an animated fretboard that teaches you what to play. You get one hundred and sixty lessons. That is alot of guitar lessons.

Another popular piece of guitar teaching software is called Play Guitar Deluxe. This is a DVD-ROM software suite which features full sheet-music printout capability. It has a range of programs: First Lessons for Guitar, Guitar Improver, Guitar Songs and Styles, Solo Guitar Performance Pieces, and Master Rock Power Chords. You can arrange your own chord progressions for favorite songs with Chord Miner Professional, the comprehensive chord catalogue and interactive software tools for novices and working pros.

There is also the eMedia Rock Guitar Method which offers a suite of programs: the guitar method, the intermediate guitar method and the bass method. With these tutors you learn a chord, you can play the first song along with the backing. You learn another chord, and now you can play a few simple songs. The aim is to get you playing as fast as possible. It has over 160 lessons covering chord strumming, rock styles, playing melodies, and fingerpicking. Learn over 70 well-known songs. The program features easy-to-read screens, enhanced audio and video, and custom animated fretboard skins. You can watch more than 50 large-format videos featuring split-screens and close-ups of both hands. Songs and exercises can be heard as either live recorded audio or MIDI tracks you can slow down or speed up. Both guitar tablature and standard music notation are taught in a way that is easy to understand.

Incoming search terms for the article:

• guitar teaching software software (2)
• interactive guitar learning software (2)