The Tascam MP-GT1 may look unassuming. It’s about the size of a packet of fags (remember them?) and the layout has been kept intentionally simple. Don’t be deceived by the diminutive size of this little fella, however, plug a guitar into the 1/4” jack input and a pair of headphones or a Hi-Fi amp out of the mini-jack output on the other side of the unit and you enter a world where playing the guitar on your tod suddenly becomes a much more rewarding experience.

STYLE AND SUBSTANCE

First of all, the unit is made out of two really solid pieces of metal which are actually screwed together at each edge, so unless you were to run it over in a bendy-bus, you’d be hard pressed to do any structural damage to this thing – refreshing for a piece of digital hardware - it’s actually built to last (phone companies take note). This isn’t just any piece of digital gear, however, in fact, according to Tascam, it’s the world’s first MP3 player designed exclusively for musicians, exciting stuff!

Hang on though, what exactly does Tascam mean by an MP3 player designed specifically for musicians? Well, imagine the fun you could have if you could plug your guitar into your iPod and not only play along with all the songs on there but could change those songs to make them easier to play along with. Well, that is exactly what this bad boy is capable of, and much more besides.

So let’s imagine you’ve got a storming rock epic stored as an MP3 file on your computer. Here’s what you do - plug one end of the high-speed USB cable (supplied) into the port on the front of your Mac or PC and the other into the MP-GT1 and simply drag any MP3 files from wherever they’re stored on your computer into a new file which will have opened up on screen for the GT1, labelled MUSIC. When you unplug the GT1 from your computer, you’ll find the dragged files stored on it. The MP-GT1 can hold up to around 240 songs, although a quick word of warning, you won’t be able to drag songs saved in iTunes, if you have such a folder, as Apple saves these as Mpeg-4 files – any files you want to drag from iTunes will have to be converted into MP3s first.

GETTIN’ JIGGY WIDDIT

So you now have some of your fave songs on the GT1 - so far so good, lets see what you can now do with them. First of all, you need to choose the song you’re going to want to play along with. Tracks are accessed via the menu button and then by selecting either Browse or Playlist using the central data wheel. Pretty much everything is accessed by these two controls, along with the Enter button in the middle of the data wheel. In fact, the key difference between the MP-GT1 and Tascam’s CD trainers, the CD-GT1 and CD-GT2, is that it has significantly fewer knobs and buttons with controls being accessed via the menu options on the LCD screen instead. This can make things a little fiddly and confusing at first but it does mean a much sleeker-looking piece of kit. The tracking controls comprise the usual Play/Rewind/Fast Forward buttons. There’s no Record button, as you cannot record directly onto the MP-GT1, only save tracks downloaded as MP3s from a computer. Your guitar plugs directly into a ¼” jack socket on the front of the unit. Then with your selected track playing, it’s simply a case of adjusting the Mix Balance, Input Level and Output Level controls so that everything is sitting exactly where you want it in the mix.

The next thing you’re going to want to do is call up the menu option labelled PB (Playback) Control, because this is where things get really interesting. It’s from here that you can change the key of the song (six increments of a semitone in each direction from the middle). If you want to retune the track slightly, there’s the option to fine-tune it in almost imperceptible increments on a scale +/- 50 (one percent at a time) too, so that you can literally tune the track to your guitar and not the other way around. One of the smartest options here though is Tempo change; perfect for conquering challenging lead lines. If you’ve always wanted to play some blindingly adept guitar part from a favourite track but ended up with ‘grindingly inept’ instead because you’ve been unable to put it under the microscope sufficiently to actually hear what’s going on, then the easiest way to tackle this problem is to slow the track down. As with Tascam’s CD trainers, here, you can do this without changing the pitch of the track. Another invaluable feature here is the Loop function, which allows you to tirelessly repeat the same passage of a song until you’ve got it down to a tee and drive anyone within earshot to the brink of insanity...


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