Music Gear Spotlight: Korg pitchblack

Okay, okay . . . I can hear the head scratching already, "How does something as mundane as a tuner deserve a spotlight?" The answer? When it's as flat-out cool as the Korg pitchblack. If you've never used a nice tuner (and by nice, I mean something rackmount or that costs more than $100), you don't know what you're missing out on. And no, this is not one of those audiophile geek things where they plug in two different cables and swear that the one hand-wound by virgins on a super-secret Japanese island using pure copper in a de-oxygenated environment sounds like liquid gold.

Tuning is a purely functional thing. When you tune, you want it to be fast, easy, and accurate. The pitchblack is the stone that kills all three of those birds with one throw. Cheap tuners are not usually fast (jumpy needles and slow note attack recognition), they are not easy (dim displays, flimsy cases, and crappy buttons), and they are not accurate (poor fundamental tone recognition). The pitchblack does all of these things very, very well. It recognizes notes super fast, its display is ridiculously easy to read, the case is solid cast aluminum, and it has a heavy-duty metal footswitch. These are the facts, not flights of fancy. I've got the tuner and it works like a champ.

You can pre-order the pitchblack right now on Musician's Friend, Music123, or GuitarCenter for $89.99. Throw a cable or some picks or strings in the cart and you're over the $99 free shipping limit, and you don't even have to leave your house to get the coolest pedal tuner around.

Music Gear Spotlight: New Boss SL-20 Slicer Twin Pedal

Ooo, kewl. Boss just announced a new pedal over at Musikmesse in Frankfurt, Germany called the SL-20 Slicer. This pedal combines several of my favorite things: synthesis, arpeggiation, tremolo, and general sonic mayhem. I love it already. The audio "slicing" is handled by 50 different onboard patterns. It's also got looping, tap tempo, stereo panning, and filter-type effects controllable by expression pedal. Cool stuff abounds.

Music Gear Spotlight: Ernie Ball Titanium-Coated Slinky Acoustic Guitar Strings

Yeah, that's right. Ernie Ball is releasing guitar strings coated with titanium. These strings for acoustic guitars are made by taking EB's popular Slinky acoustic guitar strings and putting an ultra-thin coating of titanium around each one.

Titanium-coated guitar strings? Are you serious? In a completely geeky way, I think that is one of the coolest things I've ever heard. If Superman played guitar, these are the strings he'd wail on. Mostly because they're probably the only strings that could stand up to his super-powerful picking.

Ernie Ball is calling this patented process Titanium RPS Technology. EB claims it makes the strings more resistant to rust and dirt so they sound better, longer. They also claim these titanium Slinky Acoustic strings are stronger and longer-lasting than other coated and uncoated strings on the market.

By the way, this "Music Gear Spotlight" is something I've been meaning to do around here for a while and simply haven't had the time to start, but NO MORE! From now one whenever I see a cool—or at least eyebrow-raising—piece of music gear, I'm going to share it. Cause that's what friends do; they share. And we're all friends around here, right?