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St. Louis Music’s Regent Series from Alvarez
Alvarez’s new Regent Series of guitars is made up of 23 models in a range of price points, colors, and body shapes. Each guitar features an electrostatic finish, spruce top, and a choice of mahogany or rosewood back and sides. Other appointments include a rosewood bi-level bridge, rosewood fingerboard, and premium tuners. The Regent Series comes in dreadnought, folk, and classical body shapes, with electric/acoustic versions of each body style also available.
Alfred’s Series for String Ensembles
Alfred adds two titles to the Ovation String Quartet Series, created for professional quartets, advanced school ensembles, and string orchestras. Classic String Quartets for Festivals, Weddings, and All Occasions is arranged by Alfred string author Andrew H. Dabczynski and includes highlights of classical repertoire set for a wedding, ensemble festival, or any concert event. The collection features string quartet literature, plus arrangements of other familiar works, and offers intermediate to advanced players a wide variety of musical choices.
Movie String Quartets for Festivals, Weddings, and All Occasions includes a collection of movie hits arranged by Cameron Patrick for intermediate and advanced level string quartets or string orchestra. These movie hits can be useful for wedding receptions, parties, and more.
Each title in the series is arranged for violin 1, violin 2, viola, cello, optional string bass, piano accompaniment, and conductors’ score. The optional bass parts allow the series to be used with a small ensemble or in the high school, university, or community orchestras.
New Cases from SKB
SKB is releasing a number of new cases, including a soft case series for keyboard and hard cases for digital recorders.
The keyboard soft case series includes five different sizes: 61-note keyboards; arranger workstations; 76-note keyboards ; 88-note narrow keyboards; and 88-note keyboards. All cases are constructed of wood framed walls and an outer 600-Denier nylon covering with a completely padded interior. Two large, padded straps provide additional protection and security. All cases include in-line skate wheels and legs with expanding stabilizer for standing the case on end. The back of the case features stair rails while the side includes additional trunk rails to protect the case when loading and unloading. Two large pouches are included on the lid for storage of cables, pedals, and other accessories. Straps are provided for hands free carry and for connection of other bags.
SKB’s line of injection molded hard shell cases for the Zoom H4N, Zoom H2, Zoom Q3 (and HD), Edirol, and Sony PCM recorders feature custom foam interiors. Each recorder is housed in an injection molded watertight case constructed of ultra high-strength polypropylene copolymer resin. The case shells are designed and manufactured to US Military specification standards for tactical applications. The molded unibody is a waterproof, airtight, and submersible design that is resistant to corrosion and impact damage. The interior is custom cut ELE foam that includes pockets for the recorder, power supply, wind screens, memory cards and other accessories.
Music Bible Series from Book Sales
The Music Bible series of music instruction books for guitar, keyboard, drum, and saxophone players is now available at local music stores. With collective sales in excess of 500,000 units, other types of retailers have been selling the series successfully for the past five years. The packaging for these full color books is hardcover with internal wire binding and each comes with a CD. Some of the titles include: Learn to Play Guitar; Guitar Chord Bible; Learn to Play Keyboards; and How to Record Your Own Music and Get On the Internet.
Porter Case’s Cart Series
Porter Case’s injection molded travel case with Cart series features a TSA combination lock, four-inch ball bearing wheels, single button extension handle controls, a water/dust resistant gasket, side and end spring loaded carrying handles, tough PP construction, and a built-in Cart to carry up to 150 pounds of baggage on top. The PCi comes with a choice of six different interiors.
New Yamaha Electronic Drum Set
Musicorp has announced the addition of the Yamaha DTXPLORER electronic drum kit to its wholesale distribution line. The five-piece electronic drum set comes with 22 pre-set songs, 32 pre-set kits including rock, funk, jazz, reggae, and Latin percussion, and the capability to create up to 10 customized kits. The sounds of the 192 drum, percussion, and sound effects are created from real samples of Yamaha acoustic drums, boutique cymbals, vintage drums, and other percussion instruments. Complete with multi-zone pad capability allowing players to simulate a three-zone snare and multi-zone cymbals, and educational tools such as Groove Check and Rhythm Gate.
Pearl River’s Vertical Piano
Pearl River Piano Group America, which has developed into American PR Musical Instruments, is now offering the Pearl River EU122 Vertical Piano. The 48″ tall EU122 features a soundboard area comparable to smaller scale grands. The piano offers staggered back posts, German felt hammers, leg toe blocks, and large casters.
Fret-King’s Self-Tuning Guitar
The Fret-King Super-matic self-tuning guitar features Wilkinson ATD HT440 self-tuning hard tail guitar bridge. Beginning in standard E tuning, the Super-matic can switch to open G, DADGAD, or open D, or even create up to five personal tunings. The Wilkinson ATD self-tuning bridge is a low profile, real time electromechanical device utilizing hi-tech micro gearboxes, with a micro hex pickup, controls small enough not to notice, and an intuitive one-touch button controlling all the functions and features.
Invisibly incorporating the microprocessor control circuitry, the ATD bridge allows the player, with just one touch of the function button to automatically tune the Super-matic to standard E-tuning. Tuning status is confirmed in the hi-visibility display, designed to be viewed while playing, and overall tuning is assured with the built in chromatic tuner.
Press the function button again, strum, and let the ATD change the guitar’s tuning from standard E to open G, or change to DADGAD, then to open D all in the space of just a few seconds, or recalibrate to five additional user created tuning presets in just a few seconds more.
The 25 1/5″ scale length, 24 fret, hard rock maple neck, with its classic ‘shallow C’ profile has been matched to a close grain Indian rosewood fingerboard with a 10″ radius. This has been topped off with a fret job using single cut, hand crowned medium jumbo nickel silver frets. The Super-matic features a Hum-Single-Hum pickup configuration, with Wilkinson WHHBZ33 offset pole piece Zebra humbuckers, wound to a Wilkinson WHSM vintage-voiced single coil middle pickup.
Aguilar’s Tone Hammer 500
Aguilar Amplification has created the Tone Hammer 500 – a 500 watt, versatile, bass amp that weighs only four pounds and easily fits into the accessory pouch of most gig bags.
The sound in the Tone Hammer 500 is full-sized and is produced by the Tone Hammer preamp, the same preamp used in the Tone Hammer D.I./preamp pedal. The Tone Hammer 500 features bass, treble, and fully sweepable midrange controls. The Drive control utilizes Aguilar’s proprietary AGS circuit,.
Acesonic’s Multimedia Player
Acesonic has released the Blu-Ray Multimedia Karaoke Player, the Acesonic BDK-2000, which is a multi-functional, high-definition, networked multimedia player. It can play all media from discs, USB drives, local network or Internet in HD quality up to 1080P. The Acesonic Blu-Ray Multimedia Karaoke Player includes an HDMI port and is compatible with the latest audio, video, picture and karaoke formats including MP3, WAV, WMA, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (AVI/VOB), MPEG-4 (AVI), DivX, MKV, RMVB, JPEG, and MP3+G files. The built-in Blu-Ray multi-format player supports all types of discs such as Blu-Ray discs, DVDs, VCDs, CD+Gs, CDs, and data discs.
A built-in Ethernet port enables streaming content online via BD-Live or local network media files on a network PC or network storage. A built-in USB port allows for the user to play music, view pictures or videos stored on a USB drive.
The BDK-2000 includes the most commonly used buttons on the front panel for easy navigation. An optional rack-mount kit enables users to lock their player in any standard 19″ rack. The Player also features a headphone output jack, two microphone inputs and a built-in digital audio recording function. The player also includes adjustment for microphone bass, microphone treble, microphone volume, microphone echo, and a music equalizer to fine tune performance.
