The need for years now has been to deal with the issues of digital playing and recording. This guitar is looking very much like the first really effective solution. For most guitarists, the “Schlepp Facto,r, lugging around tech, mixers, amps, and pedals to play and record is a sort of epic, expensive, annoying, experience. I know at least one guy in a band who told me that people now spend as much time arguing about tech as they do about music. The price and space management issues of all this hernia-generating technology are also limiting factors.
The Fusion Guitar has everything you need onboard for under $500 as a basic package and fits in to a car seat. It’s a major breakthrough, and people have been queueing up on Indiegogo to get on board. The Indiegogo campaign has raised $280,537 at the time of writing, and there are still 11 days to go.
Featuring a rosewood neck and really interesting fluency in the sound range, the Fusion Guitar is an uncompromising, do-anything instrument with a lot of added grunt and upside in terms of tech. You can shred or be as melodic as you like. Acoustically, it’s excellent.
Purists take note — this thing can do anything you want it to do. It even charges your iPhone while you’re playing. The Fusion Guitar is all about practical playing. The iPhone is a built in mixer, and recording studio. It’s battery powered, lithium ion, with a built-in amp. Someone put in a lot of thought in to making this guitar as flexible and practical as possible for playing.
I interviewed Sam Lodge of Fusion Guitar:
The Fusion Guitar looks pretty damn good – How about carry weight and comfort for playing?
The weight of the Fusion guitar is just under 4kg, that’s comparable to a standard electric guitar. It feels solid and well constructed, when you pick it up, it feels like a real instrument, not a toy.
The action is nice and low and plays really nicely, it has a nice fast neck and is capable of handling some serious shredding.
Can you do custom settings through the apps?
Absolutely, with apps like Bias by Positive Grid, you can open up the guitar amplifier and play around with the exact details, by adjusting the pre-amp, swapping out the tubes and setting the bias to your own taste.
The amp modelling that your iPhone is capable is producing is incredibly accurate and offers endless customisability.
Have you given the guitar to a few interested maniacs to give it a real workout yet, or is that coming down the track?
Our friend Aiden is a bit of a maniac:
How do you see Fusion Guitar evolving from here?
In building the working prototype we found a few things that needed tweaking, this is normal in the design process. There are a few things to improve so that our backers will be getting a guitar that is really well designed. Each iteration of Fusion Guitar will improve on the last in a natural progression of iterative design evolutions.
We would like to explore creating an instrument for Android in the future as well as the idea of creating a Fusion Bass Guitar. Each of these designs presents its own unique challenges, so our focus for now on getting the guitar out there.
Sound quality is very good, how much grunt power does the Fusion guitar have for power sounds?
The Fusion Guitar can get some pretty awesome high gain sounds that push out some serious power, with 93 decibels at 1 meter. That’s loud. Way louder than your acoustic guitar.
The all-in-one, “learn guitar while you play with online video tutorials factor” is a big plus – What sort of reaction are you getting to this?
We have had guitar students play around with the Fusion Guitar and they love it. There’s nothing like it for learning on. It has so much packed into one unit, which means that you can explore all kind of sounds and shape your own unique tone right from the get go.
Teachers find the features enhance the learning experience. The ability to record yourself so easily and try all kinds of different sounds helps to accelerate the learning experience. This is enhanced even further by the fact that you can read music and watch YouTube tutorials on the iPhone, which is in your guitar!
What’s been the reaction from the music hardware industry so far?
The music hardware industry is a little shocked to be honest, this guitar has the capacity to be very disruptive. Traditionalists find it hard to come to terms with a guitar that costs under $500 that can produce a sound comparable to that of a classic amplifier which costs thousands of dollars.
Can you add a bit to the “amp simulator” bit on the Indiegogo page? There are quite a few hybrid amps on the market, I have a Vox 44 amps in one myself, but how far does that go?
JamUp has 46 Guitar/Bass amp and 40 Effects available, as well as the endless catalogue of amps which people have designed on their own and uploaded. Are you a fan of John Mayer’s tone? Someone has uploaded their version of his guitar rig to ToneCloud, and now you can play it.
It’s is also worth mentioning that JamUp is only one app. There are many more that all work with the Fusion Guitar.
Check out our SoundCloud for more sound samples on the Fusion Guitar. (Note: The SoundCloud page is also a good demo of the sheer range of sounds the Fusion Guitar can do with ease.)
Does the direct recording process for Fusion Guitar go play/record/upload/mix/MP3/4?
Recording on the Fusion Guitar is simple and results are incredible. JamUp integrates really well with GarageBand so you can lay multi-track recordings and tweak the levels, adjust the panning, and add ambient effects. When you are finished you can directly upload your creation to SoundCloud or send your song to iTunes on your computer.
Stay tuned, we are currently creating a video that shows how to do this.
So – check out the Fusion Guitar stuff on Indiegogo, and try to figure out what you’ll be able to do with all that extra space, time, and money. The Fusion Guitar is expected to be on the global market in the second quarter of 2016. You can order your guitar from just about anywhere on Earth, see the Indiegogo link above for details.
