Connecting your guitar to your iPhone should be fairly simple. With the right adapter you can blow a line in through a standard headphone jack and get some tinny audio. But what if you really want to kick out the jams, as it were? For that you need something that will manage and amplify the signal as it comes out of your guitar and mic.
Lineshark acts as a sort of bridge between your XLR mics (the ones with the three massive pins), guitar line, and your phone. You can play through the Lineshark and manage power and gain using a dial on the front. Similar to the Puc by Zivix, this is some pretty geeky stuff but is a godsend for mobile musicians.
Jed Eaton and Jonathan Mayer created the project and they’re looking for $60,000 on Kickstarter. Eaton has a BSEE from Georgia Tech and works at Cisco while Mayer works at Virtual Graffiti
“Both of us are musicians – we’ve played together since middle school,” said Mayer. “In our day jobs, Jed builds consumer hardware devices and I market and sell enterprise technology. Between the two of us, we have a complete picture of design, logistics, marketing and sales. Jed plays in several local Knoxville bands, and in fact the concept and early prototypes for Lineshark came out of the ‘Band Room,’ a converted garage rehearsal space in Jed’s backyard where local musicians come to rehearse and jam. It’s loaded with mics, amps, keyboards and instruments, and we were always grumbling about having to search for converters and cables to patch instruments and effects boxes together.”
The key to Lineshark is the ability to bring audio back out of a mobile device once it’s been recorded or effects have been added. “Everything on the market was aimed at recording, not jamming or playing together,” said Mayer.
“Our project is an all-in-one audio interface for mobile devices. We connect any instrument, mobile device, and stage setup together in a single interface so musicians can use mobile devices to create new sounds in live performances.”
If you don’t know how this would work for you you probably don’t need it, but if you wanted to use your iPhone as something like an effects pedal, this would be perfect. The team is very close to manufacturing the devices and, given their skills and pedigree, it looks like these guys have what it takes to deliver. Early bird units cost $100 and you can grab one for $150 when those are gone. They plan to ship in July.
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