myRig

I’ve recently devoted a bit of effort to setting up a decent practice environment on my iMac. Here are the ins and outs of what’s working for me:

IN: Running my guitar direct into the computer via an Apogee Jam audio interface. It’s a quick plugin and the audio interface doesn’t take up any deskspace.

OUT: Running through any external pedals before the computer.  After several attempts I gave trying to use my multi-effects pedal (BOSS ME70) or loop station (BOSS RC20XL); the sound quality was mediocre (in comparison to Amplitube – see below) and with power supplies and extra leads the setup/packup effort is substantially increased.

IN: Amplitube 3 as a plugin to Garageband 10. I have found Amplitube 3 to be the best-sounding amp simulator for Mac OSX. Using it as a plugin to Garageband 10 requires a hack (which the good folks at IK Multimedia were happy to provide – it involves copying a certain plist file from one place to another). The best thing is, the basic app is free and comes with some great sounding amps and pedals. I am tempted to explore some of the paid add-ons at some point (Marshall, Fender, Orange, and others – together with a huge range pedals), but there’s no urgent need.

IN: setting up a generic project in Garageband with a number of channels for each type of guitar sound I regular want (e.g. heavy rhythm left/right, heavy lead, clean). I use this as a loop station for jamming along to some chord progression or practising a lead over a given rhythm. There is an irritating bug in GB10 which results in noticeable latency in the sound monitoring when first starting up. I find this goes away as soon as I record something in one of the tracks. Any time I end up with something I want to keep, it’s easy to export as mp3 (or direct to Soundcloud!) or save it off as a new project.

OUT: Amplitube’s loop station in standalone mode. The interface is extremely clunky and limited in features. My experience with Amplitube generally suggests that it’s an app that should be heard and not seen.

IN: Anytune Pro for slowing down and transposing songs, to transcribe by ear and play along to. I experimented with a few apps in this space, but this one has by far and away the most intuitive, well-designed interface – it’s simply a joy to use. The step-up trainer, which automatically plays a section repeatedly at gradually increasing tempos is incredibly cool and useful. It also allows you to quickly browse and import songs from iTunes (no more haplessly navigating the folders where the mp3 files live!) and remembers the various annotations and settings you apply. Overall, this app has dramatically sped up my workflow for figuring out songs by ear.

OUT: Amazing Slow Downer. The original program of its kind, but it has the most atrocious interface of any program I’ve ever used for anything, anywhere. Dropped it like a hot potato as soon as I found Anytune Pro.

IN: Guitar Pro 6, tablature word processor. Very nice, intuitive WYSIWYG editor. You enter the tab (with rhythm values) and it generates the corresponding music notation. I don’t really need the notation, but it looks cool. There are heaps of guitar-centric annotation (slides, hammer ons, tapping, pinch harmonics etc) – the end result is very professional-looking. And the best part is that you can play the score once you’ve written it out, so you can see if your rhythmic transcription is up to snuff. Should be very useful for writing out song arrangements to share with the band.

OUT: Lilypond. It’s the LaTeX of music notation editors. I love the idea, but it’s just not a realistic solution for quickly banging out a rough song arrangement.