I remember from my days of playing in a band, recording music was tough. You had an idea in your mind that you wanted to hear through the speakers, but traditional valve amp setups by themselves generally didn’t cut it. Instead I had to sit there with a sound engineer to slightly adjust each tone to create something you could be happy with.
Now what’s worse, is that when you come to play that track live in front of an audience, you want to sound exactly like you do on the CD, which then required a whole host of pedals by your feet to press at just the right moment in the track. Forget performing and jumping around the stage, you’re too busy concentrating on 17 pedals by your feet.
Well Fender have seemed to make everything that much easier for us budding guitarists. They’ve released an app which lets you do all that tonal stuff you need, right from your smartphone. The only catch is that you need to use one of Fender’s Mustang GT amplifiers which start from £195 for the Mustang GT 40, £325 for the Mustang GT 100 and £440 for the Mustang GT 200. From what we’ve seen there’s no way of using it with your current setup, so Marshall and Orange County lovers… sorry, you miss out.
The app allows players to choose from around 10,000 presets and even give you manual control on tone creations. All sounds can be changed and used in real-time. I know using a phone may be a little more difficult to pull off in a live situation, but it’s still a lot nicer than having pedals down by your feet. There are even tones that have been approved by artists themselves, so you can get a chance to sound like your biggest idols.
A feature that would be beneificial to those of you picking a guitar up for the first time is the ability to learn music through the app too with a ton of interactive lessons on hand. We will be keeping an eye on the Fender app, and will hopefully bring you an in-depth review in the future. Keep watch of this space rockers.
