Here’s what the program includes:

• Over 130 pages of instructions and exercises on alternate picking, legato and sweeping to constructing advanced runs, tapping scales and arpeggios.
• 19 Video Demonstrations so you can see and hear the techniques
• Progress charts to analyze and track your progress of each ability & speed enhancer to track and push your speed to the limits and beyond
• Printable chord charts & fretboard memory quiz
• Bonus software: 5,000 tabs, metronome, tuner, loads more!
• Bonus videos: over 20 bonus guitar videos to enjoy and learn from
• Pro membership to the website which gets you free updates for life.

A lot of great features, and it sells for only $39.95. Click here to find out more about the Guitar Methods program.

The Gibson virtual presence is called “Gibson Island” and it’s a virtual island that is shaped like a guitar, with humbucker mountains. There are theaters and other sites on the island that Second Life users can take a train, fly or teleport to and view live concerts, interviews, guitar lessons, gear displays, documentaries and a lot more. There is also free merchandise to be found on the island, although I’m not sure if it’s real merchandise or virtual.

Here’s a video by Gibson, which shows more information about Gibson Island.

The Gibson Island opens Wednesday, July 16. There will be a live 12-hour performance starting at 8am. Click here for more information.

To visit the Gibson Island, you’ll need a Second Life account, which you can get here for free.

Chromatic Tuner The Chromatic Tuner is a high accuracy tuner that will get you pitch perfect in no time. You can run in three modes: all notes, standard tuning, or choose from over 40 alternate tunings. Chord Finder The Chord Finder has over 260 chord diagrams at your fingertips and is an essential guitar player’s reference. Quickly cycle through chords, seeing in realtime the fingering for each chord. Tuning Tones Guitar Toolkit has built-in pitch reference tones to help you along.

• Metronome
  With the Metronome, you can dial in an exact Beats Per Minute (BPM) count, or tap along to a song to determine the correct tempo. Multiple time signatures and tick-tock sound effects are there to craft just the right rhythm.

You can learn more at the official GuitarToolkit website. The GuitarToolkit is available on the iTunes App Store for just $9.99.

The iPerform3D lessons are performed by real instructors who are turned into computer animated characters. By doing this, you have more control over the video content. You can rotate and zoom the camera angle, slow down the action and loop the lessons. Like nearly all video guitar lesson sites, they have a large lesson library that covers a wide ranges of styles.

Click here to try out iPerform3D for free; no credit card required.

• eJamming is recording software that uses peer-to-peer technology which allows musicians to jam together and collaborate over the Internet in real time. Here is a video of eJamming in action with Smash Mouth lead singer Steve Harwell.

  You can read more about eJamming here and here.

• Guitar Wizard is a program that helps kids of all ages learn to play the guitar and read music in a very short period of time. The learning game was developed by the Music Wizard Group, developers of the popular program Piano Wizard. The program will be available for both Mac and PC, and comes with a Washburn guitar with MIDI pickups. You can also use your own guitar, and add a MIDI interface.

  Here is a video of Guitar Wizard in action.

  You can read more about Guitar Wizard here.

• The Gibson Robot Guitar wowed the crowds at the 2008 CES. If you’re a regular Guitar MX reader, then you already know about the Robot Guitar, which tunes itself automatically using tiny servo motors. Here’s a video of the Gibson Robot Guitar in action:

  You can find out more about the Gibson Robot Guitar here.

• The Air Guitar Rocker combines the popularity of Guitar Hero and Air Guitar into a single product. Air Guitar Rocker comes with 10 songs that are played at various skill levels. The game is stored in a device with a built-in speaker, that is attached to a belt. Songs are played from the speaker as the guitar pick is waved over the Air Guitar Rocker belt buckle. At $30, it’s a poor mans version of Guitar Hero. Here’s a video demonstrating how it works.

  You can read more about Air Guitar Rocker here.

These were some of the popular music products at the 2008 CES. It should be enough to wet your palette for the Winter NAMM show, which starts on January 17th in Anaheim, CA.

Song Surgeon can cut out a segment of any digital song, loop it, slow it down from 50% to 75%, and even change the pitch. It works with any audio file format, and can even be used as a CD ripper or file converter. You can find demo videos that show how the program works on the Song Surgeon web site.

You may be wondering why you would need a tool like this, when tabs to most songs can be found online. The Song Surgeon web site raises some good points about online tabs. For example, tabs are often incorrect and incomplete. Solos are rarely tabbed on free online tabs, which makes a tool like Song Surgeon very useful. It seems it would also make a great educational tool, helping to improve your ability to learn songs by ear.

You can find more information on Song Surgeon by clicking here.

The program has become quite a popular alternative to ProTools for hobbyists and budding musicians due to its low cost and user-friendly interface. In fact, a fully functional trail version is available for download, only the ‘Project Save’ feature is disabled. The Producer version works with input from a guitar.

You can find out more about FL Studio from their web site, which includes video tutorials on using the software.

The sheet music is downloaded as a file and includes 3 pages of printable sheet music with tablature, viewed using the free Musicnotes viewer software. You can also download the tab and view it using the Guitar Guru software, shown below. The software gives you step-by-step visual instructions on how to play the song as well as audio. It’s also a free download.

In addition to the Funeral March, is another free download available this month. It’s the theme to the Halo video game. It can be downloaded here.

You can view previous free Musicnote downloads here.

The Guitar Chords Finder works by clicking on the finger positions on the fret board diagram. The program will display the name of each note. You can hear the chord by clicking the Play button. It works great, and is probably the best chord finder program on the Internet.

I have pasted the program below so you can try it out. You can view the source code here, or add it to your iGoogle page from here.