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- Product: Guitar Port, by Line 6. Includes software, digital interface and cables.
- List price: $229 (U.S.); Canadian street price: $250.
- Reviewed on: Pentium 4, 2 MHz computer made by MDG Computers Canada, running Windows XP Pro.
- The Good: A wonderful program for learning guitar and experiencing the joy of owning 10 very expensive amplifiers.
- The Bad: Can mess with your existing sound cards and programs.
- The Verdict: A wonderful example of what technology can do for music, and a fun and cheap way of getting sounds more sophisticated than you dreamed possible.
The Review:
The most fun I've had with a new piece of software in more than a year has to be Guitar Port, from Line 6.
Line 6, based in Agoura Hills, Calif., makes a variety of products for serious rock and jazz musicians, including electric guitars, amplifiers, tone toolboxes and MIDI interfaces. Guitar Port, its latest product, has a very simple concept: to imitate, using your computer, 10 of the greatest guitar amplifiers ever made.
Anyone who has mucked about at home with a guitar has experienced the anguish of not being able to afford even a fraction of all that wonderful sound equipment that has been made possible by the digital revolution. You have to spend hundreds of dollars just to get a decent amplifier, and thousands if you want one with more than just the routine controls on it.
And it's hard to say where to stop: At some point - money no object - a guitarist can end up with a home studio.
This is where Guitar Port comes in. Not only is it a tool for professionals, it is a terrific one for amateurs as well. And it's very affordable.
The instructions for installing it are easy to follow, but strict, and demand a pretty hefty horsepower from the computer. Although it will run on Windows 98SE and later, you have to have a minimum of a Pentium II running at 400 MHz, 128MB RAM, a powered or on-board USB port, an AGP graphics card, no ISA cards present in the machine, and all drives must be operating in DMA mode. The software does a check of its minimum requirements during installation, and will quit if the system doesn't measure up.
Part of the reason for these strict system requirements is the need to reduce the "latency" - or delay - of the sound. Usually measured in milliseconds, Guitar Port offers 10 ms latency, which isn't bad, but it's not concert-ready. A product like eMagic's Logic 5, a professional package for digital audio and MIDI production, boasts 2 ms latency, and can be (and has been) used in a concert setting.
This is important because one of the features of Guitar Port is the ability to play along with recorded music, and delay can wreck the experience. Guitar Port will take a CD or an MP3 file and play it, allowing your guitar to jam along. It will also "rip" tracks from CDs and store them as MP3s for use later.
And to ensure accurate play-along, Guitar Port offers a digital tuning fork. Well, it's more like a control panel, with an on-screen meter that tells you how off your strings are. If you're anywhere near concert tuning, it will automatically sense it and tell you whether it's sharp or flat; there's no need to tell it which string you're playing. That way, you're always in tune with the music you're jamming with.
Of course, the best protection against latency is a fast processor; I plugged Guitar Port into a Pentium 4 running at 2 GHz with 512MB RAM, and noticed no appreciable delay.
Guitar Port is simply software and a little red box, which looks like it escaped from the same plastics factory where Darth Vader got his mask. There's a standard electric-guitar 1/8-inch jack at one end and a series of different ones at the other - for headphones, CD player, USB and speakers - separated by an old-fashioned dial-type volume control. The unit connects to the computer via the USB cable, and draws its power that way too (no AC power required). For the sound, it sits between the computer and the speakers.
The purpose of the box is to digitize the analogue sound produced by the guitar. What is amazing here is how inexpensive Line 6 has made this product: Only a year earlier I shopped around for a MIDI interface for the guitar at Toronto's best audio shops, and found that it was impossible to get without spending at least $1,000. At about $250 (Cdn.), Guitar Port is more than a bargain.
I plugged in my Godin electric - an elegant Quebec-made guitar fashioned from Canadian maple, which makes it as mobile as a sack of anvils - and almost blew my tiny computer speakers into the next room. Not that it was loud; you can't get any more volume than your computer is capable of producing. But it was still too much for the poor little things, and they went straight to blare. When I got the volume adjusted, the Godin, which has only two tone controls on it, never sounded so good.
This is the only part of Guitar Port that makes one feel the anguish of needing to spend even more money. Though the sound is wonderful on good stereo headphones (a blessed relief for the family elsewhere in the house), one really needs a separate amplifier and speakers to get the full effect. And Guitar Port includes two RCA cables for just that possibility: Run it through your stereo system, if you dare.
Line 6 has thought Guitar Port through, and made it a remarkably flexible product. Not only will it allow playing along with existing music tracks, it will store your settings for specific amplifiers and, with a separate subscription for Line 6's peer-to-peer file-sharing network, swap the settings with other Guitar Port users.
Say, for instance, you've figured out the precise combination of dial-twiddling required to make the sound Zalman Yanovsky used on the Lovin' Spoonful's Nashville Cats. Just store it, and swap it. And maybe in return you'll get some other Guitar Port user's combination for Joan Jett's sound in I Love Rock 'n' Roll.
Or you can stick to any of the several dozen preset tone combinations that come with the package, ones with delicious names like Blizzard, Classic 68, Cream Box, Insane Beach Party, Memphis, Modern Space Thump and (my favourite) Wobble Wobble.
The amplifiers have been painstakingly reproduced by Line 6 engineers, who are the kind of people who could tell you the make and model of every piece of equipment any rocker uses. They include such classics as a '67 Vox AC-30, a '94 Mesa Boogie, a '59 Fender Bassman, an '87 Roland JC-120, and the company's own Line 6 Insane. The fanaticism with which the sounds have been reproduced include shading resulting from the material that was used to make the amplifier's box: wood, plastic, composite board and so on. The Line 6 engineers combed the world for mint-condition models, and copied the sound into the software.
The graphics on the computer screen are the control panels on the original amplifiers. Most are dials, and turning them requires running the mouse up or down the screen.
There are also graphics for a series of stomp boxes: compressor, flanger, chorus, tremolo, delay, rotary speaker and reverb, operated again by the mouse (not the feet).
The possible combinations are endless.
What, ultimately, is the purpose of Guitar Port? On one level, it's a cheap way of getting sounds usually relegated to exotic and expensive equipment. But it's more than that.
It's an excellent tool for learning the instrument from the beginning, or for experienced users who want to steal licks from the pros. (There's even a half-speed feature, which slows down the song you're accompanying without changing its pitch or key, a marvel that can be done only with a computer.) It's also great also for composers who want to play around with various sounds until the right combination is reached; this can spare the effort of going into a studio to crank up a truckload equipment just to noodle around.
Are there limitations to Guitar Port? The most serious is a tendency to interfere with other sound systems on your computer: Various CD and MP3 players may refuse to share the same hard disk and refuse to play; Guitar Port's internal mixer dismantled the sound drivers for my high-end ATI video card's TV tuner, for example. Line 6 is forever tinkering with its software, though, and an upgrade has just been posted. Until the sound driver issue is addressed properly, you may have to make a choice about the primary role of your computer.
There are two other limitations: One is that Guitar Port is not made for Apple computers - and a lot of musicians favour Apple products. The other is that its latency is too much for it to be used in a live concert situation.
Then again, Intel should soon come out with a processor that will cut latency down to acceptable levels. Line 6 may also re-issue a version for the Macintosh.
Guitar Port won't replace a real amplifier - yet. But you can have real fun playing with it first.