ROGER ADLER: Hi. My name is Roger Adler, and I'm here today to talk about the Brian Moore Guitars iGuitar. The iGuitar is a unique guitar in the sense that it has three streams of information coming out of it, so in many ways it's like a conventional electric guitar.

It's got magnetic pickups that you see here, a double, single, and double coil pickups. They're real typical but very versatile, flexible pickup arrangement. But in addition to that, the sound from those magnetic pickups, is a special piezo bridge pickup, and there's individual pickups in each of the saddles of the strings, and the sound from that you can take with a separate cable into your PA system or an acoustic guitar amp, and the output of that sounds very much like an acoustic guitar. I'll demonstrate all of these sounds in a minute.

And then in addition to that, it's got a 13-pin MIDI system, so these piezo RMC pads or pickup also puts out a MIDI output that can come through this cable into a Roland GI-20 interface box, and from there via USB into your computer. If you're using it to record with or to play virtual instruments that are part of popular applications like Garageband, Reason, different things like that. So, rather than talk about it, let me just demonstrate the different types of sounds that you can get out of this guitar.

First of all, I'm playing just the conventional magnetic pickups, and the output of that I have going into a track in Garageband, and I'm using a guitar amplifier simulation in Garage band so it sounds like it's coming through a big amp with effects on it already.

[ROGER ADLER DEMONSTRATES THE iGUITAR's MAGNETIC PICKUPS]

So you've got that type of sound, so you can be plugged into a conventional guitar amplifier and, you know, use all the sounds that you're used to using with your guitar and amp, or you could, if you're doing something like this, you can use amplifier simulations that are part of these different applications.

And then also, you can turn that down for a second. With this vinyl knob over here, you can bring in the sound of this piezo bridge pickup, which has the acoustic guitar sound.

[ROGER ADLER DEMONSTRATES THE iGUITAR's PIEZO PICKUPS]

And so you could blend those two if you'd like, so you can bring in...

...[ROGER ADLER DEMONSTRATES SIMULTANEOUS USE OF THE iGUITAR's PIEZO AND MAGNETIC PICKUPS]

So you can kind of get a combination of that acoustic sound and your distorted sound, which is a pretty big sound. Then let me turn those off for a second. You also have the capability through the 13-pin MIDI system going int the Roland GI-20 interface and into the computer, you can use that to play virtual instruments that are part of Garageband, Logic, Reason, etc. For instance, I've got an electric piano.

[ROGER ADLER DEMONSTRATES THE iGUITAR's 13-PIN MIDI SYSTEM]

So it's a lot of fun to be able to play those type of sounds which keep our players basically controlled in the past, and let me go into a completely different sound here, just to kind of give you an idea of what's possible. Rather than a piano sound, I'm going in Garageband here, I'm going to go to an organ sound like what's this? It says "Heavy Metal Organ". That'll work.

[ROGER ADLER DEMONSTRATES THE iGUITAR's 13-PIN MIDI SYSTEM]

Turn that up a little bit, that's kind of quiet.

[ROGER ADLER DEMONSTRATES THE iGUITAR's 13-PIN MIDI SYSTEM]

Now, one of the things that this guitar has is a special switch here on the guitar. I don't know if you can see it, but it's the ability, it gives you the ability to move up an octave or down an octave with your sounds, and it's very useful with keyboard sounds because a lot of times you might need a different range. So if I drop this down an octave...

[ROGER ADLER DEMONSTRATES THE iGUITAR's 13-PIN MIDI SYSTEM WITH THE OCTAVE SWITCH]

You can use the lower range of that particular sound.

[ROGER ADLER DEMONSTRATES THE iGUITAR's 13-PIN MIDI SYSTEM]

Now there's nothing that would stop you then from blending in the acoustic sound from the piezo pickup...

[ROGER ADLER DEMONSTRATES THE iGUITAR's 13-PIN MIDI SYSTEM SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH THE PIEZO PICKUP]

...and then you could even add in the electric guitar sound.

[ROGER ADLER DEMONSTRATES THE iGUITAR's 13-PIN MIDI, PIEZO, AND MAGNETIC PICKUP SYSTEMS SIMULTANEOUSLY]

So we've got the organ sound, the piezo pickup acoustic-electric sound, and the guitar amplifier simulation sound. You have all of those happening at the same time. So you could easily do that live too. You don't a computer to do that. What you would use is something like this: this GR Series. This is a GR-20 from Roland. You can plug -- you don't even need an interface like this GI-20. You can plug from the guitar directly into this because it has a 13-pin MIDI input, and you can use this to get all kinds of synth-type sounds and samples and that sort of thing. So, you could use that very easily live with this and an amp, you can have all three types/streams of sound coming out of your guitar at the same time, and you can use it live, and the guitar gives you the ability to switch between them, so you can just turn to different -- there's a volume control for each of those three streams of sound coming out of the guitar so you can blend them any way you'd like to.

Guitar players are pretty traditional people and they kind of fall into to the "I like Stratocasters"/"I like Les Pauls" kind of two different camps in general I would say, and being a guitar player and owning all of those kinds of guitars all of these years, I understand that completely, and I would say just as a guitar player, I'm a fan of these Brian Moore guitars. I used the Brian Moore guitar exclusively to record an album at the urging of Apple Computer. I do a lot of presentations on Garageband, their entry-level recording application, and so I created an album called the Garage Album, and I use my Brian Moore guitar for all of the guitar sounds. I didn't use any guitar amplifiers. I used all of the amplifier simulations, all different types of amp simulations and effects that are in Garageband, and then I also used the MIDI capabilities of the iGuitar to play all the what people would call or think of as keyboard parts, you know, synthesizer parts and organ and piano and that sort of thing. So I use my iGuitar completely as the input device for the whole album, and it was a very satisfying experience. It really came out really well I think, and I'm proud of it and pleased with it.

Now besides -- this is a double cutaway guitar obviously with a double-single-double pickup configuration that's really flexible. It's somewhat common but there's a few tricky, clever things that they gave here to get you even more sounds. There is a five-way pickup selector switch, and if you have it in this first position, it's just this humbucker. When it's in the second position, it's these two pickups together. When it's in the middle, it's just the middle pickup. When it's in position four, you have the middle and the bridge pickup, and in position 5 it's just the bridge pickup. Now these double-coil pickups, you know, for those who don't really know a lot about that, double-coil pickups kind of have the fatter, more mid rangy, and fuller sound, and single pickups generally speaking have a thinner brighter sound and so the ability to kind of blend between those is important and is something guitar players have come to expect. Now, in addition that -- for instance, on a Fender Stratocaster, you have three single coil pickups on a Fender Stratocaster, and so this guitar can kind of emulate the sound that you can get from a guitar like that because you can pull out on this volume knob and that splits this, s it's just a single-coil pickup. You can also do it with this knob by pulling it out, you can make this a single coil pickup, so you could have all three single coil pickups going there and still get a blend between those with the five-way selector, or you could leave the bridge position in a double-coil pickup setting for, you know, like a lot of times, guitar players do that for lead guitar so when they want to play -- maybe play their guitar solo, they go to their bridge position, which is going to be a little brighter and a little chuglier anyway, on a single-coil pickup it might be too piercing or whatever so a lot of times it's nice to have a double coil or a humbucking pickup in the bridge position.

Brian Moore also makes some other guitars. For instance, they have a broad line of guitars, but in their iGuitar line they also have what I would call more of a traditional single-cutaway looking guitar. Beautiful tops, gorgeous guitars, play real well, set up great right out of the box, and it has all the same configurations as far as pickup selection and that sort of thing and volume controls for each of the three streams of output from the guitar. It has the MIDI output of course, and one of the things that's unique about Brian Moore Guitars is the way that the top is contoured like this, and it's a really comfortable guitar to play, and a lot of times if you have a beautiful guitar and then you have a pickguard covering up half of the top, it's frustrating, and so for years guitar players have been taking the pickguards off of their beautiful guitars so you could see more of the beautiful flamed maple or curly maple or quilted maple depending on the guitar. And so, because this has got this contour, you really don't need a pickguard anyway. The pick really doesn't come anywhere near the top so you don't need to worry about scratching the top of your guitar (you'd have to try really hard to do that), and it's very comfortable to play. And then also, they have something unique. They have this input jack back here, and you plug in here and bring your guitar cord across the strap, and it's kind of a clever way of doing it and it makes the cable stand real well. Guitar players have been for years figuring out ways to loop their cable across so it doesn't get pulled out when they run across the stage.

So that's one of their guitars. There's another one here. Kind of a beautiful, I don't know, purplish blue. Now this guitar is basically the same as the guitar I'm playing here today. This is my guitar. I love this guitar. I use it all the time. I used it at the inaugural ball for President Bush back in January, and I just used in Las Vegas last week for a big event that I produced. It's a very versatile guitar, I love these guitars, and this is real pretty. I like blur, or is that purple. I'm not sure. Anyway, so the real point of the iGuitar, the thing that makes it unique I think is the fact -- like I said, you've got this three streams of information coming out of the guitar and it's really a versatile guitar. It can get you every possible kind of sound you can imagine out of it, and you can use if for recording, you can use it live. It's just the -- it's a way of using technology to give you more possibilities and more sound possibilities and lots of tonal colors and that sort of thing. I think it's a great guitar and I urge you to get one in your hands, plug it in, and check it out.