I Got One for Fun and the Geek Factor

I got a bit of a bonus at work, and I decided that before it all got spent I’d use some of it to get something for myself. I got one of these:

I ordered it from Thinkgeek.com on Saturday. It arrived yesterday. Pretty amazing delivery time.

The geek factor is that besides being a low-end strat knock-off, it has an integrated USB interface that lets you plug it into your computer. It shows up as a USB audio device for both input and output. You can run amp simulation software and effects on your computer, and plug headphones into it to play to yourself, or you can plug it into a normal guitar amp setup. I tried hooking it to Jenn’s brand new MacBook, and it worked ok. I didn’t have time last night to install the included guitar amplifier emulation software yet.

I’m planning on actually trying to use JACK and JACK Rack with some LADSPA plugins to get it to work on linux on one of my home machines. This will be my first attempt at using JACK, so I’ll update as I get stuff working.