If you are a working guitarist you have a need for a harmonizer pedal - you just don’t know it yet. Usually you have one singer in the band and one backup person if you’re lucky. I know a lot of guitarists that from time to time they do a “one man show” acoustic style with just themselves and a mic. There is brand new technology out now that will blow your mind, and as a working guitarist - think that it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.

“The Digitech Vocalist Live 2″ is a pedal - a “stomp box” that is a vocal harmonizer for guitarists. It was made for guitar players because you plug both your guitar and your microphone into it, take at look at this pic for the inputs…

What happens is - when you play the pedal recognizes and interprets both your voice and the chords you’re playing. It knows if you’re singing a “C” over a “G” chord progression and you can program it to sign your hamony vocal either a third or fifth above your voice. You sing and you play, and just like any other effects pedal - when you want harmony - just stomp on it!

The Vocalist Live 2 pedal also has a built-in guitar tuner, compressor, reverb, and EQ controls. So, once you buy this pedal you’ll be out about $300, but look at it this way - you now have a backup singer that works for free! It’s got the highest user reviews on all the gear sites, I think this is one new piece of technology that everyone is liking a lot!

Here’s the extended description and a few purchase options -

DigiTech Vocalist Live 2 Harmony Processor The DigiTech Vocalist Live 2 Harmony Processor uses breakthrough musIQ technology to directly analyze the output of any electric or pre-amplified acoustic guitar (no special MIDI guitars or hex-outputs needed). Then it generates the correct vocal harmony. For example, if you're singing an A over the chords that are generally found in the key of G, Vocalist will harmonize with a C. But, if you then play an A major, the Digitech Vocalist will shift to the C#…because like any good harmony singer, it listens to the guitar! A surprising number of songs "fool" other harmony pedals because these songs just don't work with a single key/scale setting. In fact, any song that has the same note sung over two different chords (for example, a C sung in the melody over a C maj / F maj chord sequence) is going to confound conventional harmony pedals.With musIQ, forget about the technology just sing and play! Skip complicated programming and having to analyze each song chord-by-chord; just 1. Plug in your microphone and guitar; 2. Pick a 3rd or 5th-above or below harmony preset; 3. Sing and play — when you want harmony, just step on the footswitch!Patent-pending musIQ technology combines new Note Detection algorithms with state-of-the-art Harmony Generation. The Note Detection section analyzes complex guitar waveforms and determines which notes in each chord are critical to accurate harmony. This information is then fed to an advanced harmony engine that creates harmonies consistent with both the singer's melody and the underlying guitar accompaniment.This totally new, musically-intelligent effects processor hybrid of traditional chordal and scalic harmony modes means that Vocalist Live musIQ harmonies stay true to not only the overall key and song scale, but also localized variations due to chords that aren't part of the global key. You've never heard anything like it!

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Here’s a great YouTube video I came across on Create Digital Music where the stage tech’s (or board op) really, REALLY screwed up! The song was Van Halen’s famed “jump”, and the keyboard intro was to be played as a backing track on tape (well, not tape really, digital - probably mp3 or something). So, whoever queued the track played it at 48K instead of 44.1K (cd quality standard) - and in digital terms that’s like playing a tape too fast or playing an old 33 1/3 album at 45 rpm. Basically it made the keyboard parts a “microtone” higher, but not high enough for Eddie to even play it a half or whole step higher to match, and what you get is a brutal, brutal version of the song. As their web site says it was definitely an “on stage disaster”!

For all of you young bucks that never saw this - here is Eddie Van Halen playing at a “Les Paul and Friends” show in 1988 (now some 20 years ago). This would have been about in the prime of Van Halen only 4 years after their 1984 album, that is arguably their best selling to date. It’s an all our rock instrumental jam that last over 5 minutes and Eddie starts it out with “Cathedral” from the Diver Down album. An incredible performance by the godfather of modern rock guitar introduced by the inventor of the Les Paul AND multi-track recording!

A pack of adapters for your powerstrip so bulky power cords don’t rob half your outlets.

Every now and then I see a gadget that I think would be perfect for musicians or guitar players. Today I saw this pack of “powerstrip liberator” plugs that are perfect for a guitar player because we always have a bunch of things to plugin to one strip. I have one powerstrip in my pedal box and I plug 3 big bulky adaptors for my stomp box pedals. If I have anything else to plug into it, it’s always a bear working around those adapters because they’re so bulky that once you plug it in it takes 2-3 outlets on the strip. With these “liberator” jumper adapters you can get around that. This combo pack is really cool because you get 3 different kinds. You get the classic kind that gets bulky adapters off the strip, and also the pass through kind that get the adapters off the strip, but have an outlet on top to give you another space on the strip to plug more things in. The last kind, which is really cool, is an adapter you can use when you’re trying to plug something in a flat space, very, very handy. I can’t tell you how many times I could have used this in a gig where the outlet was in a really, really weird place. At a very reasonable $12 - I don’t know why any musician wouldn’t want to have these in their gig bag at all times! This would make a great gift for any guitar player! Click here to find out where to buy the “Powerstrip Liberator Combo Pack”.

Do you have a cool guitar player gadget that we should know about? Please comment now!

Fender released the Van Halen Frankenstein replica in 2007 and this video is from the NAMM show where Eddie Van Halen talked about it and then performed. This was such a crazy video for me to watch, the quality is good because it was posted on YouTube by Fender themselves. The weird part was just Eddie’s mannerisms when he was talking, like running his fingers through his hair over and over (why didn’t he just pull it back?) and how disheveled he looked. Honestly if you didn’t know he was one of the world’s greatest guitar players you might’ve thought he was a vagrant or just an agin drunk. So he talks well into the video about the “Frankenstein replicas” and then he grabs one off the display behind him. He straps it on, and he rocks the complete shit out of that thing! Now I’m thinking I’m a complete idiot for saying anything bad about him at all - he is STILL one of the greatest guitar players in the world! Oh, by the way - that frankenstein replica is selling for $25-30,000!!

This is an incredible performance you may not have seen yet, it’s Billy Gibbons of “that little ‘ol band from Texas” - ZZ Top! He’s playing at the Fender gala at NAMM - and he belts out his rendition of “Texas Flood” on his well-worn Telecaster. He talks a little bit before the song - which is why this guitar video is 8 minutes long. He remembers that back in the day he and Stevie Ray Vaughan would fight over the words to the third verse of this song (and it turns out they both had them wrong). You just can’t beat Billy Gibbons, he makes it sound like “Pearly Gates” Every Time!

So when you were 12 years old playing in your school talent show - could you do this? This 12 year old GIRL guitar shredder tears it up! She may not be that accurate, but she gets a 10 for stage presence and sheer balls! In addition - she was only 12 here, who knows what she can do now!

There are tons of places online to find guitar gear deals and sales, and we have searched high and low for the best way to integrate a store into the Guitar Review site, so you can search for guitars and guitar gear right here without having to click banners or go anywhere else. What we’ve come up with is the Guitar Review Store. It has the latest guitars acoustic or electric, amps, cabinets, strings, and more! We created the store with no ads or popups - it’s just guitar products with no other garbage on the page at all, and the pages load lightning quick! It also has integrated search to make things easy, or you can browse to your hearts content. Everything is shipped from Instrument Pros, one on the most respected online instrument stores. Bookmark the page for all your online guitar gear purchases! Visit the Guitar Review Store Now

Eric Mongrain is name I hadn’t heard before, but I won’t forget it anytime soon. He also plays in a tapping style on his lap like a lot of electric players I’ve seen, but he plays acoustic and through his use of tapping, harmonics, and percussive techniques (like slapping the guitar) - he’s like a one man band! I love to watch something truly unique, and Eric has his own distinct style that you won’t soon forget. Watch how he gets the harmonics by just slapping the strings with his index finger - unbelievable!

If you’re looking for a “used guitar bargain” you can’t go wrong with the Paul Reed Smith or “PRS Santana”.

Every guitar you own can’t cost more than $1,000. We all have to start somewhere, and you can’t beat an affordable backup axe. About a year ago I needed another backup guitar and saw an ad on Craig’s List or a PRS Santana Limited model. I wasn’t that interested in it at the time, but the guy that had it for sale was only a few blocks from my work and he had some pedals I wanted to check out.

When I went over to his house he had his Line 6 pod hooked up to a small crate amp and the PRS Santana plugged in. It was a double humbucker in both the bridge and neck positions with cool “slash” like inlays. The strings wrapped around the tailpiece (a trick used for years by many people on regular tune-o-matic bridges). I’m glad that I got to test it on his POD because I tried various amp models from Fender to Marshall and back. I used “The Rover” preset (Zeppelin) and the one like AC-DC, and another like SRV. If you’re going to buy a guitar you probably already have a good idea of what you want it to sound like, but I strongly suggest you try it dirty and clean through a tube and solid state amp (or amp model). You’ll know right away if it’s got the “crunch” or clean tone you’re looking for.

I bought that PRS Santana electric guitar for the paltry sum of $150, which was a used bargain. It came with a gig bag. I wouldn’t say that it’s the greatest guitar I own, but I wouldn’t say it’s the worst either. It’s a good mid-range guitar that you can get for a very reasonable price used. Check out some of these eBay auctions live right now, you might find a great deal under $200-300, or a higher end version with more features for a bit more.

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