Stuff’s Festive Gift Guide: For your melodically-minded mates
Duncan Pike
Buying presents for people, no matter how well you might know them, can be tough. Luckily, Stuff‘s gift guides have arrived, both online and in the latest issue of the magazine, and are chock full of techy gift ideas.
We’re sure some folks will tell you that this holiday period shouldn’t be about buying gifts. Instead, it’s got to do with that famous baby or the fat old man who breaks into your house to eat your biscuits and drink your milk. Those people are either stalling because they haven’t figured out what to buy yet or they’re trying to get out of buying something altogether.
Do them (and yourself) a favour and show them Stuff‘s gift guides because the truth about gift-giving is simple – the only thing that trumps receiving something you want is the feeling you get from the look of excitement on someone’s face when they receive something they want. That’s what winning feels like.
If you’re looking for gift ideas for the music lovers in your life, here are a few to get you going.
2023 Gift Guide – Music Edition
LEGO Ideas Fender Stratocaster
The opposite of joy is despair and that’s exactly what parents feel when their child unwraps a gift that can make a noise. People who live with musicians belong to the same WhatsApp group so before we get to things that can make a noise, consider this LEGO Fender Stratocaster and Princeton Reverb amplifier set. It features authentic details like a poseable whammy bar on the Strat and removable plates on the amp, and the only noise you’ll get out of this is when someone steps on it. It’s also considerably cheaper than buying someone a real Stratocaster. St. Jerome was only able to say “affection has no price” because he didn’t know anyone who played the guitar.
If your gift recipient already has their own guitar, you’ve heard about the pick struggle. For those that haven’t, it’s a well-known fact among guitarists that there exists a separate ethereal dimension for lost picks. Scientists still haven’t figured out how to bridge our physical world with the Pick Dimension. But rather than buying more picks, your musical mate can make their own with this guitar pick punch tool. It comes with a black plastic card to get them started but once they’ve lost that, they can use any 1mm thick plastic card, like their overdrawn credit card, to continue plucking their strings.
Maybe your musician friend has retired. Maybe they already have everything they want. The first one is far more likely than the second, but this bamboo utensil set, each item shaped like a guitar neck, will suit them in either case. Musicians have to eat too and ‘exposure’ isn’t going to do them much good, contrary to popular belief. The included spoon, fork, and dual spatulas are splinter-safe and won’t mess up their non-stick cookware. Buying this as a gift comes with the added benefit of inviting yourself over for a meal to ‘test them out’ without seeming rude.
Unsurprisingly, guitars are expensive. Let someone else buy your aspiring mate that item and get this loop station from Boss to go with it. It’s one of the last things in this guide that won’t make a noise by itself and will make a great gift for any beginner guitarist or the person who can’t stop playing that one riff over and over. The 24 LED segments help keep track of the record, overdub, and play modes and all they need to operate it is a foot. They can use it with any other effect pedals or amps, like the next item, or it can be the start of their one-person band career.
This headphone amp is the antithesis of a battery-operated toy. It plugs into a guitar’s output jack and will feed the strums and plucks directly into the guitarist’s headphones, saving everyone else’s ears in the process. However, it’s still possible to use the USB-C port to capture and record the feed, so be warned. The lithium-ion battery will keep them strumming during load shedding and the 25 onboard amps and effects will keep their sound fresh. Just make sure you stress that it goes great with headphones, for your own sake.
Most musicians don’t only create music, they also listen to it – whether it’s by artists that inspire them or themselves. They probably already have headphones of some description for their solo sessions. If they don’t have something that allows them to share their tunes, what better way to do that than with a Bluetooth speaker? There are countless options on the market but the Emberton II from Marshall can make any user, musician or not, feel like a rockstar with its iconic Marshall amp design. It also happens to pack that Marshall signature sound and boasts over 30 hours of battery life.
We know what you’re thinking, a drum kit as a gift is the noisy toy on steroids. But this isn’t a regular drum kit, it’s electric, which means all of the noise can be channelled through the included headphones or switched off as a last resort. It also features adjustable mesh heads instead of the loader and more annoying rubber heads on other kits. The Alesis sound module packs ten drum kit presets and uses “Intelligent Dynamic Articulation” for a realistic sound. Your gift recipient gets the added benefit of 60 drum lessons from Melodics so at least they won’t sound terrible for long.
This synthesiser was the most egregious act of aural vandalism we could find and legally include in this gift guide. We know we went on about warm feelings earlier but the cold look of hate from the partner of whomever receives this can be just as satisfying. The Otamatone is a tadpole-looking synth that runs on batteries (or you can buy an AC adapter separately) and produces a similar sound to an animal in pain. The only upside is that it requires two hands to ‘play’ which might make dodging thrown objects a lot harder for the user.
