The Insomniac Player

If you are having tune instability issues with your guitar, you may want to check out your tuners, especially if your guitar is in the < $200-300 MSRP range (if you are above that mark it is reasonable to believe that your tuners will be of slightly better quality). You can easily change your tuners to locking tuners, which have a locking wheel underneath. When you turn the wheel, the peg bites into the string and locks it into position. Because the string is locked, there's no need to wrap the string around the peg. Because there is no wrap, it is a lot harder to misjudge how much you are tightening the string, which means less chances of accidentally breaking the string. And because it is locked in place, there's no slip, so you will have better tune stability, you will still have to account for string stretching, humidity, etc. but at least your string length will be constant. A good quality set of these locking tuners will run around $50-60. You can go under $20 if y...

What is it? It's a digital audio interface for Mac and Windows. Basically an external sound card that allows you to feed a microphone and guitar/instrument into the computer at the same time. Each of the inputs has its own gain control with a color LED to warn you if the signal is too hot. The microphone input also has a switchable 48V power source. The headphones/monitor outputs can be used to listen to the sound as processed from the OS, or you can bypass all processing and listen to the signals as fed into the device. Setup Be prepared, this device ships with a gazillion licenses for two Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) and about a gazillion plugins and even your choice of one of four virtual pianos. It is almost overwhelming, the software bundled with this device probably costs twice as much as the box itself. My workstation is a Dell Windows 10 Enterprise workstation with Intel Xeon E3-1270 V2 @ 3.5GHz, 32GB of RAM, operating system and data are on separate physical ...

I was told to keep my guitar(s) out of the case and nearby so I always have an excuse for a quick practice session. These are now mounted just three feet away from my desk, the mounts can be found here for just $10. The kit includes two mounts plus three sets of drywall screws. The mounts can be adjusted for length, and they can be tilted for uneven heads (see the Telecaster). Installing them was dead simple, I actually spent more time measuring them than what it took to drill the holes and mount them.

Details  here .

A horrible thing has happened. The two on the left are my son's, I don't know if they fed after midnight or what happened, because suddenly there were two more. Left-to-right: Rogue RD-80 (got it as a kit at Guitar Center, < $150 including a shitty bag, shitty strap, shitty, spare strings, a whistle tuner, you get the idea) Squier by Fender Affinity Telecaster, Competition Orange ($199 at Amazon) Squier by Fender Affinity Telecaster, Butterscotch Blonde, Left Handed ($199 at Amazon) Donner DAG-1CL, Left handed ($128 at Amazon with a nice padded bag, a decent digital tuner, shitty spare strings, decent strap, a generic capo) That's actually our second RD-80, the first one split at the head within 24 hours, luckily we had purchased accidental damage insurance. To avoid my wife kicking us out of the house, we are using VOX AC-30 amplugs (~ $35 each at Amazon) and headphones instead of amplifiers.

Fender Play is usually $10/month or $90/year if you prepay. For this Black Friday weekend you can get a year for right under $45, plus a 10% discount on Fender.com purchases for the whole year: https://www.fender.com/play/checkout?promocode=fenderplayfifty This will work even if you are still using a 14-day trial account.

Mandatory "start of my journey" post: My first and only attempt at learning to play guitar was somewhere before 1992, in my last couple of years of college. Didn't learn a single chord, eventually a neighbor "borrowed" the guitar and I never saw it again. Fast forward 27 years and my son kept asking me for a guitar until he wore me down. While waiting for the delivery I started to watch video tutorials and everything clicked. So I turned around and ordered myself a lefty Donner ( DAG-1CL 41 ). I am now 7 days into the Fender Play online course, and so far my fingers hurt like hell which is a sign that I am actually learning something.  We'll see about that.  Also, I have arthritis, and it amuses me that my fingertips are hurting far more than my joints. So I guess that at the very least I am getting some much-needed exercise.