Magical digital sound processing and the Korg PX4
A few months ago I bought a ’90s Gibson SG, a really lovely instrument, however I only had a cheap amplifier on loan from my neighbour. I particularly missed my Fender Blues Deluxe tube amp which is back in Ireland. In any case, I was in the market for getting more guitar gear. Then a couple of weeks ago, my friend Seth told me he’d just bought a Korg PX4. He explained it was a small, portable effect processor for the guitar, and claimed it was a lot of fun. Well, this prompted me to have a look at this thing myself. I was very impressed with the feature list.
Having been playing the electric guitar for a number of years, I recall the scene in the music shops of Dublin being one of very expensive gear. One hundred pounds for a delay pedal, very expensive amplifiers - I paid roughly $1,000 for my Fender tube amp around six years ago. I remember paying around forty pounds for a guitar tuner about ten years ago. I felt quite strongly that I wasn’t interested in all these sorts of gimmicky effects, I just wanted a good tube amp, some fuzz, re-verb and maybe delay for slap-back.
As a poor student I didn’t have any money at all, let alone the money to justify spending a hundred pounds for a measly delay pedal. I used to play around with digital sound editing packages. I’d record some riffs on my PC and filter them. Not nearly as much fun as doing this stuff live. That was the real problem. All the software then was seemingly designed for studio work, none of it was geared toward live effects processing. I was frustrated by this. I remember thinking, why the hell doesn’t someone make a program which records and stops recording on queue (say, pressing the spacebar) while playing back an audio stream, supports looping and basic multi-tracking, and can apply some effects in realtime.
Last year I did finally find a program called Guitar Rig. It emulates a number of different amps and has a ton of effects. It was fun to play around with but, despite having a dual-core 2.2Ghz machine with plenty of memory and some special low-delay ASIO driver installed, there was a noticeable lag in the output. Furthermore, it is pretty annoying to have to plug my guitar into my PC. A portable, low-power device would be much more convenient.
Enter the PX4. This thing cost me $82 on eBay. Its roughly the same size as a Sharp Zaurus C3100 or an older generation iPod. It emulates a bunch of different amplifiers, has lots of different effects - many of which are named after famous musicians’ signature sound. It has a built in tuner. You simply plug in your guitar, and then plug in speakers or headphones or whatever. The sound quality is excellent. It also supports some looping and recording features which I haven’t yet tried. Supposedly it has a practice mode where you can record licks from your favourite band and loop them as you try to learn them.
This post isn’t supposed to be an ad for the Korg PX4. I’m sure there are other similar devices out there that are equally good. I haven’t done a whole lot of research in this area and in fact I haven’t even used the device all that much yet. My point is that I’m astonished at how good this device is, for its price and size. And how quickly this technology has seemed to have popped up. I would seriously question the need for a practice amp, and indeed any other effects units at all. $82 and you get not only one professional-quality sound, but many. And its highly portable.
I was talking about this with my brother last night over dinner, and he mentioned how he was very impressed by a group called Loop!Station which consists of a vocalist and a chello player. Apparently they create very interesting music using a BOSS RC-20 Loop Station pedal board. I myself saw a vocalist (no idea of the name, unfortunately) perform at Burning Man ‘06 who was likely using a similar device, and layered up a very impressive sound indeed. Total one-man show. These things are going for around $200 on eBay. I think I may have to buy one.
Playing in a band is a very time consuming thing to do. Its also difficult to find people who will commit to practicing regularly. Additionally, you need a space to practice in which is added expense and hassle, and you need to carry all your gear over. It seems to me that all these small devices should make it much easier for the individual musician to explore creating their own deeper, fuller compositions with much less overhead. Plug it into your PC, record it, encode it as an MP3 and upload it to your website!
