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By Rik Elswit
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What do you do when there's nobody to jam with? These great practice tools will give you all the benefits of a band (and none of the drama).
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Playing music in a group is an experience that keeps many of us hooked on playing. But acquiring the skills to make music with others takes time, and learning with your bandmates looking on can be a bit intimidating. Over the last few years, though, a bevy of practice tools have hit the shelves, making solo jamming not only a more fulfilling experience but just plain fun, too. A living-room soloist can now use practice amps with built-in rhythm sections, computer software that generates style-specific backing tracks, and stomp boxes that loop what you play so you can accompany yourself.
Many of these devices have similar functions with different emphases. But they can all help you create music that you can interact with—taking much of the drudgery out of practice and turning it into play. So join us as we take a look at some of these new and proven products that can turn a regular solo practice into an inspired, creative, and productive full-blown jam!
CD Trainers: Play Lead Guitar in Your Favorite Band
Plug your guitar into a CD trainer, like the Tascam CD-GT1 ($199 list/$139 street, www.tascam.com) or the Alesis Playmate Guitarist ($299 list/$199 street, www.alesis.com), and your guitar tone will be added to the mix, enabling you to play along with the songs and bands you love. You can also alter the tempo and pitch of a song and loop specific sections on which you want to focus. So if you want to learn Eric Clapton’s solo from “Sunshine of Your Love,” for instance, slow down the song so you can analyze his fingerwork and follow along at a more manageable pace. Once you have Slowhand’s moves down, you can tailor your sound to suit the song using the built-in effects.
Drum Machines: Strum to a Different Beat
With a drum machine, you can string together actual drum samples to make complete rhythm tracks, adjusting the tempo to whatever you want. Some now enable you to build in bass lines, too, giving you a complete rhythm section to play with. Many drum machines also come with very hip preset rhythms, and some even come preprogrammed with complete songs that you can augment with whatever grooves strike your fancy.
Boss, one of the rhythm machine pioneers, has a range of them from the DR-3 ($229 list/$179 street, www.bossus.com), which has an easy-to-program mode that helps beginners build drum tracks, to the DR-880 ($599 list/$495 street), which comes loaded with guitar effects and Roland’s most realistic drum and percussion sounds.
Although principally guitar multieffects pedals, Zoom’s A1 ($99 list/$59 street, www.samsontech.com) and G2 ($164 list/$99 street) have built-in rhythm sections that, while not as sophisticated as dedicated drum machines, provide a great groove for practicing or songwriting. As an added bonus, the pedals’ amplifier models (which replicate the sounds of classic amps), reverb, chorus, delay, and distortion help you experience how different tone recipes fit with your playing as you jam. What’s more, they’re inexpensive, use high-quality 24-bit processing to keep your tone sounding sweet, run on batteries, and feature a headphone jack so that you can practice silently anywhere—in a package small enough to stash in you guitar case.
Modeling Amps: Turn Your Solo Jam up to 11
Always an innovator, Fender now integrates jam tools into a line of modeling amps called G-DECs. These versatile systems, which include the G-DEC 15 ($359 list/$269 street, www.fender.com) and G-DEC 30 ($493 list/$369 street), model the sounds of many classic amps and come with a built-in rhythm section. The amp can also play MIDI sound files from your computer, and the phrase sampler can loop sections of your own playing or music from an MP3 player. Once you’ve built a backing track, or introduced a loop or song fragment, you can use the modeler to select a classic amp tone that suits the tune.
Tascam’s GA-30CD (pricing to be detemined, www.tascam.com) marries a 30-watt, solid-state amplifier with a CD trainer. The amp’s Variable Speed Audition feature slows down licks you’re studying without changing the pitch, eliminating the need to tune down and retune, and a Guitar Cancel feature allows you to dial out the guitars on a given track so you can have the stage. The amp also comes packed with effects from Reverb and Chorus to Tremolo and Auto-Wah, and has a line input so you can hook up your MP3 player as well.
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