" THE   ZERO   GUIDE "

Now available: the always titillating "FRETBUZZ" software! **NEW**

AMPLIFICATION / ANALOG EFFECTS

I dunno if I needed to write a whole chapter on this. But I recommend using typical guitar/bass rigs with your new geeky plastic-guitar-with-laptop instrument.

Tube amps, distortion pedals, delay pedals, phasor stomp boxes, etc... all these things are great to have in your arsenal of sound processing gear. It's the classic setup I'm talking about - used by bajillions of rockers for decades - and it might not be wise to dismiss all these tried and true devices when trying something new and weird.

So, in short, a great way to rock your GH controller is to take the output signal from your computer hardware and pipe it right into your amp rig! Does your amp go to eleven?

Oh, another thing to mention: ground loops. I encountered a nastly ground loop problem when originally connecting all the hardware components together, including our bass and guitar amps. It was like, "BZZZZZZ", big time. I was bummed out until I tried placing a 3-prong to 2-prong AC ground-lifty adapter thingy on the power adaptor to the laptop. That solved it! I don't know what the precise problem was - but we have an old tube amp and some analog equipment in the mix - who knows what was going on in the circuit that was powering all these things.

FINAL CHAPTER : NOW FORM A BAND