I have wanted to purchase a digital metronome for quite a while to use while practicing scales and building speed. However, most of the time that I am practicing I am sitting either in front of or within decent range of my computer. It dawned on me, why don’t I just search for a metronome online? There has got to be something flash or Java based somewhere.

Well, I was right, and I actually found a pretty good one too. Metronome Online is a free full featured flash based metronome. It has tempos ranging from 40bpm to 208bpm and also has a feature to play the A440 frequency to give you a reference for guitar tuning. The sound of the tap is pretty pleasing and I’m pretty happy with it. I pretty much have no use for a stand alone metronome now.

Tips on Using a Metronome to Build Speed

The main purpose of using a metronome is to teach you to keep in time when playing your instrument. It will help you learn to play to a beat and keep a consistent tempo. It can also be useful as a speed reference when learning to play faster.

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I have been using the new Guitar.com for a day or so now and I feel I have experienced it enough to give you my initial impressions.

It really really wants to be a Web 2.0 site, but sadly, it’s not. The site has a very Cliché CSS look, but the feel is lacking. The problem is the website is full of content that looks like you can edit it inline, but in actual fact you can’t. When you hit update it submits the information old-web style and refreshes the page. Because of this, I really don’t like the way the profile editing is setup. If you click edit beside more than on field, and then click update, it will only update the last one you edited - this is annoying and time consuming if you want to update more than one thing at once.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like how you can create a complete profile full of all your favorite artists, music, videos, and gear. I think this is the essence of what the site is supposed to be about. Guitar players love to talk about gear and music. The fact that you can earn money from suggesting gear to others is interesting too. The problem is the whole site feels like it is focused on selling first and being a community second. An example of this is when you are adding all your gear to your profile, it clearly just searches Musician’s Friend. So if you have gear that is not currently available for purchase, you can’t add it to your profile. Despite the fact that my 81/85 EMG Pickups and Line 6 Spider II amp are very popular, they are not available on musiciansfriend.com, so I couldn’t recommend them. This is problem with the music recommendation section as well. If you do a search for an album that is not currently available on iTunes or Amazon.com you wont be able to add it to your profile.
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Guitar.com has been under construction for a few months now. I first noticed that it was down for redesign January 25th, 2007 and reported it here. A month or so later I signed up for the private beta and was never contacted. Now I just got an email today saying it has moved into the public beta stage.

From what I can see Guitar.com has produced a last.fm style site geared directly towards guitar players. I’m still waiting for my confirmation email before I can log in, but here is what Guitar.com has to say about the new site:

Join. Create your profile. List the music and gear you love for others to discover and if they buy based on your recommendation, you get a commission. Write your blog, use it for education or amusement and earn advertising revenue from the traffic you generate on it.

Customize your home page, add the content you love via rss, move it around where you want and store and share your favorite Youtube or Google vids.

Communicate with others on the forums and groups and raise your webCred to make your recommendations show in more places and have more value in the community. List stuff for sale or swap in the classifieds section. Guitar.com is for you, a place to call home. A place for you to make money doing what you love and a place to discover music and gear you might have never known about.

Also still in development is the standalone application Rype. Rype looks to be a GarageBand type of application that doubles as a front end for the Guitar.com website as well as a marketing tool for selling your songs on iTunes. Again, there are not a lot of details, but it does say Rype will be in beta “soon”.

I’ll check back in as soon as I get the confirmation email.

I have just added a couple sites to my blogroll so I thought I’d point them out.

MusicGadgets.net

I have come across the site more than once in my online travels and have decided to make it part of my daily reads. The site posts interesting news and information about great music gadgets. It is an open topic music gear site, but there are a lot of guitars and guitar related posts to read.

Check out the main page at MusicGadgets.net or here are a couple of noteworthy posts that I found interesting:
Midomi, recognize the song with your singing
Tronical PowerTune System
DIY again: credit card picks
Monster Guitar Picks

Indieguitarist

Here is another guy, who like me loves guitars and music. I dont know what more I can say about it. I have had a lot of fun reading his posts so I added him as well. Check out this post about his guitars. He has some nice ones, and his collection has actually grown. He sent me a picture of his Wall o’ Guitars and I am seriously jealous.

Cary from Electric Guitar Review has just announced a new guitar forum that he is hosting called Tube Freaks. Cary says the forum is geared towards vintage guitar and equipment enthusiasts but stresses that all guitar and music lovers are welcome.

The great thing about getting into a forum early is you can take part in developing it. Cary has a thread right now in the feedback section asking members for category suggestions. I think this shows he is really interested in making it an open community for guitar enthusiasts. I have already signed up and have made my mark on the show us your gear thread. By the way, another good thing about getting on a forum early is you get first dibs on the user names.

The forum is just getting off it’s feet now, going by the quality and popularity of his weblog I’m sure in no time it will be a busy site.

If you try and visit guitar.com right now you will see that the site is completely down while they do a redesign. I haven’t been to the site in quite a while and thought I’d visit it the other day when to my surprise I was greeted with the following message:

The new guitar.com is in production. We hope you’ll come back to see what we’ve done, it’s pretty exciting. The new guitar.com will be a place for guitarists to interact musically and socially. We’ve developed Rype, a desktop application that allows musicians to record, edit and produce music. Rype has a social network built around it to allow musicians to collaborate, send each other music files, projects for collaboration, video chat, voice chat and instant message via Skype. Form virtual bands on guitar.com, then launch Rype, produce your songs and post them for sale on iTunes.

So it looks like guitar.com is jumping on the web 2.0 bandwagon and implementing some more social networking aspects. I am excited to see that the new site will be. As of now the forums are still up, so you can swing by there and take a look.

Also in production is a new Guitar One Magazine website, but they are not planning on being up until late March. That is a long time to have your website down if you ask me. I would think you would want to just keep the old one up while you were working on the new one.

I found this link via Digg.com yesterday. This guy, Brian Eastwood makes custom guitars that kind of remind me of a Picasso painting. I’m not sure how they are functionally, but they definately are unique.

For a while now Last.fm has offered a “plug-in” for your website that will allow all of your visitors to view your profile directly from your homepage. Pandora has also released a similar function that will show your top stations and your favorites from your homepage.

Here are some examples of the Last.fm plug-ins.

My recently played songs:

My all time favorite artists:

My favorite tracks from this week:

Now I would love to show you the Pandora site plug-in. However, it seems as though only US residents are currently allowed to sign up for an account. Without an account I can not use the site plug-in. They are currently working on licensing the music for international use though, so maybe one day soon.

I think this is going to be my last post in this series for now, but I have been saving the best for last. In my first post on AllMusic I was talking about different (non-internet) sources for finding new music and probably the most valuable for me is my friends. I found out about most of my favorite bands through friends. (more…)

I came across this set of guitar posts titled Because I’m All About the Guitar over at Half a Pica Distance one day when I was browsing Technorati. The blog’s author, Cullen, has written 21 great posts (so far) about guitars, guitar gods, his musical favorites, and much more. He really brings a personal element to the posts and I enjoyed reading through them.

To check out his series of posts starting with Zakk Wylde Then and Now, head over to Half a Pica Distance.

The Guitar Shred Show lessons site takes a unique approach at teaching guitar players how to shred. The site has a flashed base interface and is all in a video form. We follow the path of Mr. Fastfinger who teaches us to shred by example. It’s really easy, you just press a key between A and Z or 1 and 0 and Mr. Fastfinger will demonstrate a different lick for you. Along the bottom of the screen the lick is shown in tab form for you to learn as well. The really fun part is you can make your own shredding solo by pressing different keys from A to Z in succession. Mr. Fastfinger will move from riff to riff creating a wicked guitar solo.

It’s fun for quite a while actually. There is even a story mode where you have to dual with an evil tribe god to win the praise of the village people.

Realizing that AllMusic.com isn’t the only music database online I figured I would turn my Where to Find New Music post into a miniseries of posts about other sites that have similar functionality.

In this installment I’m going to show you a ridiculous web application called Pandora that was created by the Music Genome Project. What is Pandora then? Well think of it as your own personal radio station that only plays music that you like! Wouldn’t that be nice? Well Pandora is the closest anything has come to just that. The advantage to Pandora over a site like AllMusic.com is you get to go by the sound of the music, not just the name of a band or song. (more…)

Nothing beats the feeling you get when you find a new band that you love. You know, when you get really excited about a new guitar player or group that you just want to listen to them all of the time. Usually you find new bands through reading magazines, talking with friends, or just by chance. Some of my favorite music was found just by chance, including Led Zeppelin and Zakk Wylde. Other bands like Dark Tranquillity, Himsa, and Children of Bodom were referred to me through friends. It’s all music that I couldn’t imagine living without.

But what happens when you are in a slum, all of the music you have is old and the thrill is gone. You are looking for something new, but similar to what you are interested in now, but don’t know how to find it. I hope I can shed some light on some great resources for finding new bands.

Allmusic.com is one of my favorite music databases. It has been around for quite some time and has some really great features for finding new music. (more…)

The Roadhouse is the finest blues you’ve never heard. The site hosts a weekly one hour blues podcast featuring unknown or unsigned artists. Podcasts also include a featured artist each week, sometimes with an interview. The site has been going strong for over a year now and they are currently up to cast #55. I’m not sure if all 55 are still online, but any you can get are worth a listen. Its some great music and a great listen for any blues fan. I’m not a real podcast kind of guy, but this one is great. I hope they keep up the great work.

Check it out at http://www.roadhousepodcast.com/