Take Up Modeling with Roland's VG-99
Roland's original VG-8, circa 1996 or so, was astonishing! At guitar shows around the country, people stood in long lines just to get a chance to play it. Why? Because by adding a GK-3 divided pickup to almost any guitar and plugging that into the VG-8, you could make it sound like almost any other guitar on the planet. Add a GK-3 to a Strat and call up a smoky Les Paul. Attach a GK-3 to a Les Paul and dial in a Gretsch hollowbody. Want your new "virtual guitar" to play through a vintage Twin Reverb or a Marshall Stack? No problem. Then add studio quality effects, and it's no wonder Roland sold so many of these. But naturally, Roland being, well, Roland, they continually added more guitar, amp, and effects models using their proprietary COSM technology and eventually released the VG-88. Now, just six years into the new millennium, along comes the VG-99, which takes everything Roland learned in the previous incarnations and combines that with several exciting new features like a ribbon controller and the company's exclusive D-Beam technology. The VG-99 now has two COSM modeling engines, so you can actually play two different guitar sounds simultaneously! There's even a new GR-300 synth wave that can be used by itself or combined with real guitar models for sounds nobody has ever heard before. The VG-99 can play in a variety of alternate tunings, including custom tunings all your own. Roland even added the most requested feature of all, a guitar-to-MIDI convertor, for direct connection to keyboards, sound modules, software synths, and so forth.

  Cakewalk's SONAR 7 64-Bit, Dual-core Ready for PC Arrives
For musicians owning PCs that wanted all the coolest features in one package, there was really only one choice: Cakewalk's SONAR software. Now the company has built upon their ultra-solid foundation and introduced SONAR 7, which takes the DAW program to dizzying new heights!There are brand new plug-ins, new comping tools, awesome virtual instruments, and tons of additional features that will add polish to your mixes. These include the Boost 11 peak limiter, guitar amp simulators, and genuine Lexicon SE reverb! Okay, now add in the fact that Sonar 7 works on the latest Windows Vista systems and is the only DAW that takes full advantage of 64-bit end-to-end processing. SONAR lets you customize menus, toolbars, screen layouts, channel presets, track icons (pause to catch breath), color schemes, and the ability to play nice with other 3rd-party VST, DirectX, and ReWire effects and instruments. Pick up the phone and talk to your Sweetwater Sales Engineer about SONAR 7 Studio, as well as the SONAR 7 Producer Edition, and the wide range of upgrades that include a number of competitive upgrades. For PC owners, the future of Windows-based audio is here now!

  Guitar of the Day
Today's Guitar of the Day is a replica of Eddie Van Halen's famous, home-made guitar, affectionately known as "Frankenstein", This instrument is so amazingly detailed that it might even fool Eddie himself! This reproduction is the result of Fender guitars and Eddie Van Halen joining forces to offer up a brand new line of EVH-brand guitars, amps, and other essential gear. To kick off this new partnership, the company built just 300 limited-edition Eddie Van Halen Frankenstein replicas. To achieve the authentic look and feel of the original, this red, black, and white ash-bodied guitar has been put through Fender's astonishing aging process in order to create a duplicate that's accurate right down to the last scratch, nick, ding, and cigarette burn. The biggest challenge in the process? Finding enough 1971 quarters to match the one Eddie stuck under the original tremolo bridge in order to mount the Floyd Rose tremolo tailpiece. Features include a Seymour Duncan Custom Shop EVH humbucker in the bridge position and a single master volume knob (that says "Tone") mounted on a fragment of a Strat pickguard. While it's capable of molten-hot overdrive, back off the volume control and this pickup cleans up nicely. To accurately reproduce all the pieces of the original "Frankenstein," Fender placed a non-functional 3-way pickup switch and a single-coil pickup in the remaining two body routs. All the parts come together to create one of rock's most historically significant guitars, which Guitar World magazine included in their book Guitars that Shook the World. The body was a second that Eddie bought for $50, while the neck set him back a whopping $80. Yet Eddie used (and abused) that guitar during the production of Van Halen's first albums and world tours. The price for owning your own Frankenstein? Suffice to say that you truly cannot put a price on possessing a piece of rock and roll history!