Seeking Guitar Teachers

We realize with a high speed affordable MIDI guitar like ours it opens up a whole new world with your budding guitarists. We want everyone to play numerous guitars and enjoy acoustics and electrics galore. We also understand that new guitarists are often coming from gaming and to them just having to tune a $150 guitar can be a lesson in patience like no other.  We want to help. (Our guitar never needs tuning)  Please let us know about yourself and how we can help you.  info@inspired.com

Also see what Berklee performance grad, author, teacher Karl Aranjo has to say.

Go to the e-commerce site to open an affiliate account.

Music Made Mobile for the Masses

First Timers:

• The You Rock Guitar is a great learning tool for anybody that wants to play because:

• No stringing required offers a smoother learning curve while maintaining the feel of frets & strings all the way up & down the neck.

• No tuning – Chords don’t sound ‘off’ because of the constant retuning requirements of strings.  The two features combined allow you to pick it up and play right away – no wasted time setting up or adjusting.  It’s truly plug & play.

• Ease of Use – Between the strings and the You-Rock Mode that auto-corrects common finger-positioning mistakes, early practice is a lot more rewarding as users sound good from the get-go.

• Versatility – It can emulate almost any instrument, providing the user with a wider choice of songs to play. The Chord-progression modes help the player growth and expand his/her musical horizons at their own pace.

Composers/Musicians:

The You Rock Guitar is a great compliment to any guitar player because:

It is small, lightweight, and portable – perfect for travel/on the road playing

Versatility of multiple sounds/instruments in one – don’t have to carry multiple instruments with me to write/compose different sounds on different instruments.

Plugs into headphones or amps so I can use it anywhere (plains, trains, automobiles)

Long battery life (~8 hours) – compose from LAX to Heathrow airports.

Fun; all the different effects, sounds, recourses of the instrument push the boundaries of creativity.

Video Gamers

The You Rock Guitar is the first instrument to truly bridge the worlds of gaming and real music, enabling you to use an actual instrument right from your game.

In 2009, those benefits are limited only by the games themselves.  While the instrument (combined with the Game Flex Module) works out of the box with existing games, there is no additional/incremental functionality to the experience other than hitting strings instead of buttons.

But as game developers/publishers takes advantage of a new peripheral that begins where today’s accessories end, there’s no limit to what kinds of innovation will be possible through the You Rock Guitar.  Here are some obvious examples:

Games will be able to offer modes that increase in degree of difficulty by more closely associating in game notes to real notes played in any song.

Speed, rhythm, number of notes, complexity of notes, chords, and songs, will enable a continuous transition from simple/easy beginners, to ‘playing along-side the real music’ as the actual performers would see fit.

Both developers’ and gamers’ creativity will drive game development and a natural evolution between 100% game (role play) and 100% performance (music play).

The game’s appeal will broaden, as more people of all ages & skills will relate to the experience.

Teachers/Educators

The You Rock Guitar makes teachers’ roles easier:

• The properties of the guitar inherently make it easier for students to immediately see results – the satisfaction comes quicker and hurdles are overcome more easily.

• Measure progress – when connected to a computer, the instrument can keep track of every note and chord that you play, and will provide you with ‘reports’ on what/how you did, what errors/mistakes were ‘corrected’, along with behavioral trends.

• Custom learning – The instructor can utilize the SDK to create customized learning plans that meet the specific needs of their students and that assist in measuring and analyzing their progress.

• Fun will drive more players into the market for real instruments; driving demand from more students and the desire for more lessons – translating into increased revenues.

Music is About Fun – a la YOU ROCK MODE

No rulers across the wrist here, no boring repetitive droning of your scales and tabs.  The great thing about getting into Guitar Hero and Rock Band  is that you “feel” the emotional impact of performing. OK, you only end up with some very fast rhythm experience, but your long way from really rocking.  And let’s face it, it’s not any fun playing on an out-of-tune electric guitar, or crashing though some bad partial riffs and misfinger chords.

So what if there was a way to NEVER have to tune the guitar and what if you could go into a mode where you could only play the correct frets for the chords you were jamming to?  Guess what my young Padawan?That’s exactly what we did with the You Rock Guitar.

First, you never need to tune a You Rock Guitar.
Second, in the You Rock Mode jamming with our loops, we map the frets out so you can literally run your fingers up and down or if you want to really get to rockin,  you learn the main patterns and pentatonic riffs that every guitar player needs to know. It’s all about muscle memory and we make that part fun. Here comes guitar 2.0.

Educators Hail Jimi Hendrix As Role Model for Teachers

Are the San Francisco school district in a purple haze?

Because they have chosen one unusual role model to grace the cover of their new education guide, and some residents are questioning whether the decision is a good message to send to the city’s youth.

On the cover of the new district guidebook – aimed at changing the educational “experiences for every child in each of our schools” – is a portrait of 1960s rock legend Jimi Hendrix, known as much for his fatal drug habit as his revolutionary take on rock music.

The district’s manifesto asks readers to remember “the first time you heard Jimi Hendrix,” before proclaiming “our plan is as transformational now as his music was then,” according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle.

But the image of Hendrix – who didn’t make it through high school – is not limited to the cover. Indeed, Hendrix’s face appears on nearly every page and the manual, which also comes with a Hendrix poster and canvas tote, all distributed to hundreds of administrators in Superintendent Carlos Garcia’s district.

Garcia told the Chronicle that he was simply trying to “revolutionize” the district and felt comfortable with Hendrix’s controversial image because “Hey, we’re in San Francisco.”

But not all administrators feel the same.

One concerned “liberal hippie educator” in the district – who went unnamed for fear of retaliation – told the Chronicle, “I find the choice of Hendrix as inspiration to be used in an educational setting rather strange and out of touch.”

Born in 1942, Hendrix rose to fame after delighting audiences with an innovative, experimental sound and his remarkable skill as a guitarist. His shows often included outrageous stunts such as playing the guitar with his teeth or lighting it on fire.

He enjoyed short-lived but significant success until his untimely death at the age of 27 whe he died after choking on his own vomit after a drug overdose.

SOURCE:FOXNEWS 5-7-09  http://bit.ly/Nld8z

The Guitar is mightier than the sword! From USAToday.

Within minutes, however, Lefcoski and an Iraqi bass player were working their way through Caravan, a classic by the American jazz great Duke Ellington. During the clinking of piano keys and the plucking of bass strings, Lefcoski said, they soon realized that “music was universal.”

The State Department wants to expand on that universal feeling with its new Musical Overtures program, which took Lefcoski and his band to Afghanistan, Armenia, Iraq and Lebanon in April.

Though U.S. musicians have visited other countries on cultural exchange missions for years, Musical Overtures is the first to take them into the dual war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, says Alina Romanowski, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for professional and cultural exchanges.

The State Department had wanted to send such delegations to both countries for years, but only recently have “situations on the ground” allowed for enough safety to send musicians, Romanowski says.

This kind of cultural diplomacy dates back to the Cold War, says Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Music was considered “a good cultural weapon” and the government sponsored jazz musicians specifically because “jazz was an internationally known, admired and a respected art form identified with the United States,” he says.

Sending jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie was one of the few ways to penetrate the countries behind the Iron Curtain, Morgenstern says.

The challenges for traveling ambassadors are different after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, though Alvin Atkinson — the lead singer and drummer of the band Lefcoski played in — says foreign attitudes toward the USA seem to be improving since President Obama took office. On a separate tour two years ago, he says, a man in Jordan called him a “bloodsucking imperialist” and demanded that he leave the country.

“With our new president, there’s a possibility to talk about things and not just assume things,” Atkinson says. “We now have the possibility of at least having an intellectual conversation.”

Funding for the State Department bureau that runs Musical Overtures and other cultural programs expanded under President George W. Bush from $900,000 to $10 million in 2008. The budget for 2009 is at $8.5 million.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has cited the need for cultural exchanges as part of the Obama administration’s emphasis on “smart power”: using non-military means as a way to expand American influence.

One of Atkinson’s most vivid memories from Afghanistan came in the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, where he danced on stage with Hassan Bismil, a famous local singer. Atkinson began to sing, and the crowd quickly grew from a few dozen to more than 300 people.

The locals didn’t know English, but they tried to sing along with him anyway, he says.