Welcome to the world of Geek Guitar! If you’ve already geeked up your rig, this is the course you’ve been drooling for. If you have no idea what Geek Guitar is all about, this is the course that will seriously alter your guitar consciousness. In either case, a warning is in order … the material in Geek Guitar is highly addictive and will likely lead to extended leaves of absence from family, friends and work. The Geek Guitar community has exploded over the past year largely due to better, faster, and more affordable software and hardware. Today, tens of thousands of players, from novice to pro, are geeking up their world for recording, performance and composing. And it’s no longer rocket science – any non-technical player can immediately put these technologies to work with outstanding results.

Geek Guitar is a comprehensive series of plain-language tutorials covering recording, notation and live performance technologies for guitarists. Our resident Geekness, Marc Schonbrun will show you how to easily record your guitar into a computer (with and without midi), tap into thousands of effects and amp simulations, lay down any type of instrument track using your guitar, layer in loops of any variety and tweak all to your hearts delight. In short, you’ll learn how to create professional sounding songs with you playing all of the instruments on a single guitar.

Geek Guitar shows you how to notate (in tab and standard notation) anything you play on the guitar instantly and error free. You can even “play” your composition back to you. Use this to notate your favorite riffs, progressions, songs or full-blown compositions.

Finally, you’ll be introduced to performance technologies that will absolutely blow your mind. Imagine walking into any recording or live gig with just your laptop and a guitar, plugging into the board or the PA system, and having every conceivable tone, effect, amp and cabinet simulation at your fingertips. That’s Geek Guitar!

The days of expensive, complicated solutions with poor tracking and limited features are long gone. Geek Guitar covers what we consider to be the best solutions for both PC and Mac: Sonar Home Studio - a complete Audio/MIDI recording application for Windows XP; GarageBand – a complete Audio/MIDI recording application for OS X; Sibelius G7 – tab, notation and publishing solution for Windows XP and OSX; Roland GI-20 – converts guitar signal to MIDI through USB; Guitar Rig 2 – the ultimate computer based effects and modeling solution; and Brian Moore’s iGuitar – optimized for USB and Midi connections.

IMPORTANT NOTE! You DO NOT need a new or special guitar to start geeking. For example, Guitar Rig 2 comes with its own floorboard that you connect to with a regular guitar cable and then connect the pedal to your computer. For midi, it’s as simple as attaching a Roland GK to your guitar and then running it through the GI-20. If any of this seems a bit confusing to you, fear not … its all explained in Geek Guitar in plain language.