Music Gear for sale in Second Life

I've never been to Second Life, but - inspired by this Wired feature - I've been trawling the shops for cool music gear. Dissapointingly, I've found no vintage synths (supergeeks will have to make do with this) and rather a lot of new-agey crap. By far the most prolific SL music-gear-maker is Robbie Dingo - you can buy his guitars, percussion kits, pianos, bagpipes and Hyper-Flutes here. A steel drum costs L$120 (40 cents in real money), while a Hyper Flute - which seems to let you create your own music - costs L$3,000 (around $10). Most Second Life instruments are really toys - they'll play a couple of sound loops and animate with your avatar. Some are slightly more advanced: Robbie's 1965 Fender Stratocaster (L$400/$1.40) "loops a funky pattern that can be transposed via the menu system to any key whilst remaining in time". How many guitarists can say the same?

Robbie (who is British) has a blog about Second Life instrument making. His greatest claim to fame was creating the guitar used by Suzanne Vega when she played a gig in Second Life - as far as I can work out, this is just a prop - she was playing a real guitar into a microphone, whch was beamed into the concert. There's a great video about making the guitar here.
Other SL gear manufacturers include Neurocam Audio, who produce headphones and microphones. How does a microphone work? It "serves a purpose: It changes your chat to GREEN in the chat window, allowing the event host the ability to be noticed above noisy crowds!".
Finally, just L$1 (1/3rd of a cent) buys you a Cigar Box Guitar as featured in Make Magazine.
Does this all seem a bit strange to you?
UPDATE: A house full of synths here and a cool groovebox here. (Thanks, Stella)

Posted by Tom Whitwell.

Comments:

Too funny. Hmm.. maybe we should go into the virtual modular business in Second Life. : ) What's interesting is people are making money off of this. Next step would be for actual independent companies to start going into business with virtual goods. I heard there's talk of starting a tax on virtual goods. I forget where I read it, maybe Boing Boing or Gizmodo. It's coming...

# posted by

matrix : 6:45 pm

The tax issues is something that keeps coming up. Though it looks like, right now, they're holding off. There was a story at http://secondlife.reuters.com about it.

# posted by

Anonymous : 7:04 pm

Octal Khan has a nice studio with a few playable synth replicas (just looped samples, but still fun) - info here. Don't think they're for sale or anything, but anyone can wander in & play with them.

Not to plug, but I've made a MPC/groovebox wannabe as well (loop samples again) - video here and slightly inflated article here.

Beyond loop-based things, SL's pretty limited musically. Robbie Dingo's "hyper" instruments (and Gerami Fizz's too) are the pinnacle right now, using something like the old abc format to notate songs, triggering an octave or two of note samples. There's been work on MIDI-to-SL by residents but the latency is pretty unbearable, all sound is streamed & can get laggy, etc. Messy, but still fun to putz with. I'd love to someday see people creating music collaboratively in there, though.

# posted by

Anonymous : 7:43 pm

Ironically, synths aren't even considered "real" enough musical instruments for a virtual world.

# posted by

Anonymous : 8:14 pm

Octal here! yeah that article was from long ago, before it was a working studio.Now there are more synths and more sounds. Come on by a try it sometime at:

secondlife://shamrock/56/158/100

# posted by

Anonymous : 9:58 pm

PS: I had a "press release" about it here (with pic):

http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=126812

# posted by

Anonymous : 10:05 pm

GO OUTSIDE... Go to a coffeee shop, make noise, break stuff, get kicked out

# posted by

Anonymous : 6:35 pm

have you seen the blogentry at createdigitalmusic? http://www.createdigitalmusic.com/

There are some vintagsynths available like the Conbrio

http://www.slboutique.com/index.php?p=buy&phrase=synth&n=0&itemid=116472

# posted by

Anonymous : 5:00 pm