Handcrafted guitars are Spokane man's art: Article from the Seattle Times about luthier Joel Stehr.

Carbon Fibre Guitars

Dave over at Carbon Fiber Gear blog focusses on guitars in his post on 6 Sexy Carbon Fiber Guitars (or Carbon Fibre as we spell it in the UK). My personal favourite of the bunch is The Handle, pictured here, now being marketed by XOX Audio Tools, although originally it was to have been part of Italy's Jim Reed brand. Check out this YouTube clip of the guitar in action (although there are a lot of delay effects in action, it's still an impressive demo).

It looks like things have come a long way from the days of Steinberger and Status guitars and basses.

Seasick Steve - Cut My Wings

I was at a party on New Year's Eve and so missed the phenomenal Seasick Steve's appearance on Jools Holland's end of the year "Hootenanny" programme on BBC2. If anyone recorded this on DVD-R, please get in touch as I'd love a proper copy of this. Oh, and if you get the chance - go see him play live!

Edit: The programme was repeated on BBC2 on Saturday 12 January, so I managed to catch it then, but guess what? It looks like the programme was edited because we see Seasick Steve playing another song, "My Donny", on an acoustic 6-string, but don't see him playing "Cut My Wings" on the 3-string Trance Wonder as in the above YouTube clip, which is clearly from the same programme (same set, same guests, etc). Grrrrr... Did anyone record the original broadcast?

Tele with T Rex vinyl pickguard

Here's a clever idea that I'm surprised no-one has ever thought of before. This Squier Tele has been fitted with a pickguard made from a vinyl LP record, in this instance "The Slider" by T Rex. Marc Bolan fans can bid for this guitar on eBay now.

If you need to axe, you can't afford it: The Sydney Morning Herald discusses the vintage guitar market and the ever-increasing price tags, prices having risen by 300% in the last 18 months!

Bill Gates with a stupid toy guitar buddying up to his new bestest mate Slash?

Not on this blog.

Skull Strings

I've just installed a set of Drop C tuning Skull Strings on my Fernandes Native Pro by way of experiment. The makers claim that they are of the "perfect gauge and tension for extreme music", and that they last longer and sound louder! Quite a claim.

Actually, I haven't used a Drop C tuning as such, I've downtuned the entire guitar by two whole steps below standard tuning, so that low to high it's tuned C-F-A#-D#-G-C. Experimenting with the various different effects settings I'm able to get some quite convincing modern metal tones, but far more interesting for me is that using digital acoustic simulation, I'm able to create some really interesting and quite usable sounds. (I'm not really aiming to get into that whole death metal/grindcore thing). Anyway, it's early days and I expect I'll report again on how these strings are working out for me.

Getting into a spin

It's Michael Gaughan and his Quad Chopper guitar!

If this cheap and nasty monstrosity is supposed to look like the skull of some poor long-dead bovine beastie, then why is it blue? Another half-arsed effort.

It's the HARRY WORTH^* double-neck Strat!

Here's another highly comical bad-looking guitar that I scraped up from the bottom of the eBay barrel especially for your delight and amusement at the beginning of this new year.

Who is this supposed to appeal to? Is it for those who can't decide if they want to play left or right-handed but don't want to appear to be a complete tool like that Michael Angelo Batio fellow?

I suspect it was just a cheap and easy way to build a double neck using readily available parts. I doubt it'll be a popular seller though.

Actually, it seems it's a half-arsed effort; if you click through to the eBay selling page you'll notice in another photo that it has two right-handed necks on it, thus spoiling the mirrored illusion.

* For those of you outside of the UK or else of not advanced enough years to remember, Harry Worth was a British comedian who had a TV show back in the 60s, during which title sequence he used to get up to some memorable shenanigans playing about with his reflection in shop windows. Somehow the above guitar brought this to mind!