Month: January 2020

Those of us who have attempted (rather unsuccessfully) to learn guitar and ended up learning the ukulele sometimes miss the “fuller” sound of the guitar, which makes it appropriate for sadder songs, just to mention one possibility. The re-entrant high-G tuning of most ukuleles doesn’t help much in this regard, but if you are, say, in a gig situation where you are going to amp the instrument anyway, there’s an inexpensive solution that will supply the “missing strings” without having to change your uke or your playing style at all. It’s called an “octaver pedal.” Read More

I have this thing for making a guitar sound like something different, like a piano, or a marimba. Those instruments produce short, “plucky” sounds like a guitar, so why not? One way to achieve this is to output MIDI instructions from a guitar, which has been attempted with rather limited success ever since MIDI was invented. Well, I’m happy to report that the wait might be over for the majority of us guitar (or ukulele) hacks. It’s a gizmo called “TriplePlay Connect,” and you can get it for under two hundred bucks. In this article, I make a pretty thorough review of it, including how to connect it for the quickest best results. Read More