If you are thinking of learning to play guitar, you may want to take a serious look at the Self-Teaching electronic guitar from Pacific Digital. Anyone of any age, can learn chords and strumming by following lights. Some features include a selection of built-in songs and riffs for you to play along with and you can download more songs from your computer into the guitar.

You can also program your own stuff. I can now program a song in about 30 mins that used to take 6 hours. My music has a better “feel” thanks to the velocity sensitive “strings.” I actually feel like the MIDI grid helped me adapt to a real guitar’s frets. It’s a little flimsy feeling though, but for the price, any keyboard in this price range would be the same

In addition to 9 realistic guitar sounds, Pacific Digital includes 8 bass guitar sounds, banjo, the Japanese shamisen and grand piano. It comes with a built-in speaker and headphone jack which can be connected to an external amplifier. An LED complex gives visual feedback as you play. There are volume, tempo, balance and capo controls as well. These cutting edge features help overcome many of the objections of beginner guitar players

I bought this to control my midi soft synthesis and I absolutely love it. I don’t care about it’s internal sounds so much but they are still effective. Using this with Sonar or Max MSP, I can create the sounds I want triggering my midi devices.

The strings have excellent sensitivity, and the button-style fret board isn’t as bothersome as I thought it would be. You can turn off the internal speaker at any time, and as I mentioned above, you can just insert the MIDI inputs right into the computer when desired.

Your drums sound better with ginger sugarsnaps in the mix!

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