Music is a great gift to give this Christmas so we put together a list of some which are available in the United Kingdom. They may be available in your country, if when you read this you are elsewhere in the world, but you will need to establish that before you can buy.
I have chosen musical gadgets assuming that just about everyone these days will possess a PC with a USB connection. However, the second beauty of these USB devices is their ease of installation. Also, if you decide you want to use them after you have alerady started your PC they will usually be recognised as soon as you connect them
Roll-Up USB Piano
The Roll-Up USB Piano, is one of my favourites. It is a rubber mat with a four-octave keyboard moulded into its surface. Plug it into a USB port and you can make beautiful music with the software with it. It is not just a piano either. A range of polyphonic instruments is available, and there is also a metronome to help you practice.
A few years ago all instruments of this type, albeit often using special additional boards which needed to be set-up inside your PC, supported the MIDI system, in which a host of tunes have been set up, by hobby and casual players. Many of those that might receive this player as a gift may indeed already have their own MIDI collection. The Roll-Up Piano doesn’t support MIDI, or it could have been useful for those with an existing computer music setup, who wish to replace old favourites and add their own accompaniments.
Also, roll-up and easy to put away it may be, but it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to play as if you don’t use enough finger power as you play the notes don’t register at all.
Nevertheless, for knocking out an occasional tune, and for a bit of a sing-song on Boxing day it is a cheap and cheerful present selling at around £30 (about $60).
USB Electric Guitar
If rock and roll is your thing, the Behringer iAxe 393 is a real electric guitar that connects directly to your PC via USB.
Bundled with it is a free version of Native Instruments’ Guitar Combos. What is that I hear you ask? Well the software simulates a wide range of amplifier sounds.
There is immediate enjoyment to be had from a quick jam trying out all the different sounds, but again in a similar way to the USB piano the iAxe didn’t in the end strike me as being a serious musical instrument.
If you were hoping that the included software would act as a sequencer plug-in, then you will be disappointed and there’s no simple way to hear yourself playing through your PC’s speakers, the audio output signal has to be routed via a non-standard audio output at that is fixed onto the guitar itself.
Now, a further point to make is that the guitar itself isn’t of very high quality. For the price at around £100 (about $200), you could hardly expect anything of real musical quality though.
In common with many budget Stratocaster copies, it does also suffer from pickup hum, and the machine heads have a spongy, imprecise action.
I don’t think that its a bad deal at the price though - and since the iAxe has a standard quarter-inch jack in addition to the USB port, you can always plug it into an amp and rock out for real.
USB Guitar USB Connector
Of course, if you’re a keen guitarist, you probably already own a high-quality instrument. In that case, you might be interested in Behringer’s USB Guitar Connector. This neat little box turns any electric guitar into a USB device, and as for the guitar it comes with a free version of Guitar Combos.
The Guitar Connector shares the iAxe’s software limitations, so don’t expect to drop it into an existing recording setup. It only costs £50, so you’ll have money left to buy the full version of Guitar Combos that interfaces with a sequencer or software that works with a 32-bit ASIO stream.
USB Virtual Drum Kit
To complete yourself an USB band, you could buy yet another USB based gadget. That’s the Ion VirtualDrumX, a system of six velocity-sensitive pads and two pedals that trigger a kit’s worth of drum sounds on your PC, at about £130 inc. VAT (about $260).
There is bundled software supplied out of the box with provision for 233 different percussive sounds, plus a drumming game which should help you improve your skills.
The musicians who read this will want to know whether the VirtualDrumX works best as a standalone device. No, unfortunately you cannot use this device as a MIDI trigger, which will disappoint many.
Please also do be aware that the six identical pads which are supplied in the kit can’t reflect the action of a real drum kit. In truth you’ll be applying the same action if you’re splashing a cymbal or pounding on a low torn.
Again, these are gadgets to which will really only be able to provide amusement and a taste of the real-thing. But, possibly rather better than the predecessors in this review, this USB Drum Kit gives a good introduction to drumming.
Buying this technology and gadgets for Christmas is cheaper than investing in real skins, and since all the sounds are generated on your PC, you can put on a pair of headphones and not worry about disturbing the family while they sleep off their Christmas lunch.
