Photo courtesy of Ovation
December 18th, 2008 – Ovation has released a new guitar which purports to be the first acoustic/electric guitar with a built-in MP3 recorder. The idea is that it you can record your playing using an integrated condenser microphone, or you can play along with a backing track that’s loaded into the preamp.
The preamp has a USB cable to export recorded audio, and input backing or tutorial tracks. It also has a tiny condenser mic hole on the actual preamp (I have no idea what good that does unless you plan to sing into it without playing for songwriting ideas), along with a headphone jack, play/pause/record button, and a loop button for your avant-garde one man band performances.
It’s a pretty cool concept for a guitar and something that I could see loop-based performers warming up to immediately. On the Ovation site, however, they heavily plug the guitar as a learner and songwriting tool and I can definitely see the case for that. One of the especially cool things about the iDea is that if you go to the website (which is linked below), they have guitar lessons you can watch for free. When you buy the iDea, these lessons come preloaded.
I’m not sure exactly how the playback works since it doesn’t specify that on the site, but I would imagine that you would have to use your headphones, or have your guitar plugged into an amp. Interestingly, the “sound holes” that are a signature of Ovation guitars seem to be changed up on this model. They’re lined-up elipses instead of the usual circular sound ports.
I must confess that I have not been a huge fan of the Ovation sound (while loud, the models I have played aren’t as smooth sounding as I’d like), I have recorded extensively with them. The on-board preamp is handy for having another track to mix in along with the miked one. From the tutorials, the iDea sounds pretty full and I’ll reserve judgement on the tonal qualities of the guitar until I can play one in person. It’s available now for a very reasonable $600 on the street.
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