Guitarbud lets you connect your guitar to your iPhone

As close as I come to playing a musical instrument is the occasional round of Rock Band. If you are a guitarist looking for an easier way to record your songs and jam sessions, using your iPhone or iPod touch the Guitarbud device is just what you need.

The Guitarbud is a cable that lets you connect your guitar directly to your iPhone or iPod touch and offers a headphone jack as well for private listening. Once connected your guitar playing can be recorded using various iPhone or iPod applications.

Once you are done playing you can send your music off to friends via email. The cable is six feet long and doesn’t take up lots of space when you are on the road. The guitar plug is 1/4″ and the headphone and iPhone plugs are 1/8″. The cable requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later and works on second gen iPod touch players with OS 3.0 installed.

Guitar concept has no strings but fingers don’t know

I received a guitar for Christmas when I was from my parents and then they sent me to lessons to learn to play the thing. That was all fine and good until I realized you had to practice a lot and I lost interest, plus I kept breaking the strings and losing picks. The one thing that most guitars have in common is strings. A concept guitar at Yanko Design has no strings and isn’t intended for playing Rock Band.

The concept is a MIDI instrument for digital musicians that can replicate the sound of any guitar setup. The pickups and frets on the guitar are digital inputs and the neck is touch sensitive. One thing that you lose with a guitar lacking strings is the feel of the strings vibrating.

The designer says that the concept uses piezo-electric actuators to emulate vibrations corresponding to the played note. That means in a nutshell that the guitar offers faux sting vibrations so you feel like you are playing with strings.