When this Valentine guitar arrived, I took a look at it, puffed out a quiet “Hmmph,” and carried on working. Even though I’d seen photos, I was still underwhelmed by the instrument’s appearance: pale, natural wood; a tortoise shell pickguard; and the kind of doughy, conservative shape that could make even an audience of meth-fueled Juggalos fall asleep.
Apple just added another bunch of playlists to Apple Music that will help you discover new music from your favorite genres. They’re called “Breaking,” and they’re filled with over two hours of the hottest tracks.
Regardless of what interests you have in your life, there is probably an Instagram feed for whatever your proclivities might be. Into rockabilly or baseball or even stamp collecting? You can undoubtedly find a couple of interesting photo feeds.
Since searching Instagram can be a frustrating and time-consuming endeavor, we have started to do it for you. This week we bring you feeds for baseball fans, vagabonds, parents and a couple of others.
Instagram has become riddled with so many photos of kitty cats, inspirational sayings and kitty cats spouting inspirational sayings that it has become nearly impossible to find fun and interesting feeds to follow without spending hours staring at your iPhone. So we did it for you.
This is not so much a “best of” list as a starting point that should open your mind to what else is out there in the great big Insta-world.
To me, the 1976 Gibson Explorer means lust at first sight, love at first feel and that rarest of man-machine crushes: an enduring passion that persists long after I plunked down my hard-earned cash.
Gibson’s luthiers prototyped the Explorer (alongside pointy siblings the Flying V and the apocryphal Moderne) in the ’50s. The space race was on, rock ‘n’ roll was coming into its own and cars boasted bold curves and sci-fi fins. The Explorer and Flying V were released in 1958, a year after the Soviets launched Sputnik 1. (The Moderne didn’t makes its official debut until 1982.)
Like the beautiful but doomed Power Mac G4 Cube, the radically shaped guitars were clearly ahead of their time: These pointy instruments, which years later would become staples of heavy metal and hard-rock style, flopped hard. Gibson discontinued both lines within a few years.
In 1976, spurred by the success of competitors’ Explorer clones, Gibson came to its senses and reissued the Explorer. The natural mahogany finish on the best of these, much like the lighter Korina of the original models, gave the strangely shaped guitars a retro-futuristic look. That marriage of old and new is coming back into fashion now as designers tumble to the innate beauty of natural materials.
Imagine if games like Guitar Hero weren’t just a stupid waste of drunken time but actually taught you to play the guitar instead. That way, you could actually get some benefit from the hours you pour into practicing the game.
Tabrider is that game. It’s an interactive training app which you play with your real guitar. It looks pretty neat.
Believe it or not, Black Friday has already come and gone. Pretty soon the Christmas season will begin, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.
Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.
From now until Christmas, Cult of Mac will be putting together holiday gift guys full of ideas for the special ones in your life, no matter what their interests or your budget. Today, we’re looking at gifts for the whining kids in your life.
There are plenty of USB-capable guitars. But there aren’t many $200 USB guitars. Now, you can not only get a USB Stratocaster for the price of a terrible Android tablet, but it actually comes from Fender — albeit under the Squier diffusion brand. But whatever, right? It’s a Strat, and you can hook it straight up to GarageBand and play it through some of the sweet (not Fender either) amps.
Macs and musicians have always been synonymous (not to meantion aliterative), and some of the first creators to make a nonsense of the canard that the iPad is “only for consumption” were musicians. And where music nerds go, specialist hardware always follows. Here’s a list of the best Mac and iOS music accessories out there.
iPad-owning guitarists are going to love the Digitech iPB-10 Programable Pedalboard. It’s a stompbox with ten stud switches and a wah pedal on the side, all of which work with your iPad to give a range of music effects that you’d normally need a whole case of pedals to create.