I came across this demo video that someone recorded at NAMM this year. The Fender rep goes through all the functionality of the Stratocaster VG guitar pretty quick.

Essentially what we have here is a standard American Strat that also has digital modeling hardware built in. It runs off of 4 AA batteries. The guy in the video says “if you get the high voltage ones that you put in digital cameras it will last about 10 hours.”

Anyway, check out the video.

Video found via Zillinois

I am going to go on a bit of a rant right now and just toss this out there. Can someone please tell me what the appeal of a replica guitar is? Ok, so signature guitars are one thing. You want to sound as close to your guitar idol as humanly possible, so you buy all of their gear including their brand new INSERT GUITAR MANUFACTURER HERE Signature guitar. But I just don’t get where guitar makers are finding a market for all of these replica guitars complete with every scuff, stain, and scratch of the original.

The first one I saw was ESP’s James Hetfield Truckster. It comes complete with the same wear marks that are found on James’ original. Ok… sort of a cool idea, I’ll dig it. Then I came across Dean’s Dimebag Darrell Dean from Hell ML replica. Again… ok, even though I have issues with Dean taking advantage of Dime’s now legend status to sell guitars after his untimely death (RIP Dime).

Then the big announcement at NAMM was Eddie Van Halen worked out a deal with Fender to produce a limited number of exact replicas of his Frankenstrat guitar. Now… I don’t think I need to point out the obvious, but I will anyway. The original wasn’t even a Fender. In fact it said Charvel right on the headstock. So is fender going to go as far as to find the same original parts that went into making the original Frankenstrat? I really don’t think so. Never the less, they will sell for thousands of dollars.

Even as I write this I came across this Gibson Custom Limited Run Zakk Wylde Bullseye Aged Les Paul. Again, who wants to pay $7,999USD for scuffed up replica?

Gibson has released their second Guitar of the Week and man is it stunning. Gibson announced the Les Paul Classic Antique at this years NAMM Gibson has been making it for years. Look at the amazing finish on this guitar. Gibson calls it Fireburst and I think it is just freaking amazing.

Like I said the guitar is a run of the mill Classic Antique complete with ‘57 humbuckers, ’60s slim taper profile, rosewood fingerboard, and antique binding. The Les Paul is no different from others keeping the 3-way pickup toggle switch and volume/tone controls in their standard positions.

Obviously we can’t expect Gibson to be putting out a totally unique Custom each week, but I hope we get to see some more variations from their standard product lineup in the future. Again though, I am all about this finish. I think it’s stunning.

I am not really sure what to think about this guys technique. I think the first half is very noisy and it doesn’t really sound that great for what he is doing. However, in the second half he does some really amazing acoustic tapping and then does some kind of slapping as well. I would be willing to bet that he has some experience playing a bass guitar.

Half good half bad. If he had have done the stuff from the second half all the way through I would have been much more impressed. Interesting technique though, and I am amazed with the amount of volume he was able to get with no pick.

Ok, so here is an exercise I use to improve my alternate picking speed as well as my left and right hand coordination. I picked up this little exercise from John Petrucci’s instructional video Rock Discipline and just modified it a little bit to my liking. It is a chromatic pattern, but a little bit more interesting than the standard 4 note, 4 fret up and down pattern. The following should be played using alternate picking, or up/down/up/down.
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Jackson has just unveiled a new signature guitar for Mark Morton of Lamb of God. If you head over to jacksonguitars.com right now you’ll see their little showcase. The guitar is a customized version of the Swee-Tone Jazz’r that Mark himself helped design.

Jackson has lost a few artists to ESP over the last few years… well basically since they were bought by Fender. This shows some artists still have faith in the Jackson brand. The guitar, which Mark Morton helped design really is run of the mill though. If you look on Jackson’s site, all of the unique features are in the aesthetics. You’ll see though that it has all of the standard metal guitar features including Seymour Duncan pickups, jumbo frets, and neck-through-body design.

Set aside the amazing finish and unique body design. The thing that stands out at me is both the bridge and neck position have the same pickup. To be hones the first thing I would do after buying this guitar would be swap out one of the pickups with a different Seymour Duncan to increase the range of sound. On the other hand, this IS a signature guitar… if you are going to buy it my guess is you are trying replicate Morton’s sound. Either that or you are like me and are having strong sexual feelings towards the guitar due to it’s stunning finish.

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Cary from Electric Guitar Review has just announced a new guitar forum that he is hosting called Tube Freaks. Cary says the forum is geared towards vintage guitar and equipment enthusiasts but stresses that all guitar and music lovers are welcome.

The great thing about getting into a forum early is you can take part in developing it. Cary has a thread right now in the feedback section asking members for category suggestions. I think this shows he is really interested in making it an open community for guitar enthusiasts. I have already signed up and have made my mark on the show us your gear thread. By the way, another good thing about getting on a forum early is you get first dibs on the user names.

The forum is just getting off it’s feet now, going by the quality and popularity of his weblog I’m sure in no time it will be a busy site.

Every Tuesday every week Gibson plans to announce a new limited edition guitar that will only be available for that week. They are calling the program Gibson Guitar of the Week. A maximum of 400 of each model will be made and after that, there will be no more.

The first model to come out is the SG Supreme Bass. Interesting that they choose to do a bass for the first “Guitar of the Week”. I’ll be keeping up with the guitars that come out of this program.

Well, it’s that time of year again and NAMM Show has come and gone…. and I missed again. It’s not like I missed the actual show, because I’m not a NAMM member, but I did miss all the fresh news about products and such.

For those of you not in the loop, NAMM used to stand for “National Association of Music Merchants”. These days they have dropped the full name and just go by the acronym. Basically they are a global organization for the musical equipment industry. Each year they hold a trade show that exhibits all the great new music making products from every company. It is not open to the public, you have to be a NAMM member to attend and to be a NAMM member you have to make, buy, and/or sell musical instruments and products. Right now I am just playing a little catch-up, so lets see what I can find about this years show.

On the official NAMM Show website they have a recap of each day including pictures.

Play Guitar Now has a load of great pictures from each day of the show.

Cary at Electric Guitar Review linked to another NAMM 2007 picture gallery at Modern Guitars Magazine that also has a whole bunch of great shots.

Line 6 unveiled the Floor POD Plus basically combining a POD 2.0 with a huge list of premium effects in a portable stomp box floor set.

Gibson announced 11 new guitar models including the digital HD.6X-Pro. Modern Guitars Magazine has all of the details.

Fender showed off the VG Stratocaster, a modeling guitar. It is equipped with a digital pickup, a modeling dial with 37 different models, and a tuning knob that allows you to select from 5 alternate tunings.

Eddie Van Halen and Fender announced a signature EVH Frankenstein replica. The replicas play like a dream but physically feature every nick and mark the original has.

Man, I could probably go all day reading up on all the great stuff to come out of the show… I guess I still have a lot of reading to do.

If you try and visit guitar.com right now you will see that the site is completely down while they do a redesign. I haven’t been to the site in quite a while and thought I’d visit it the other day when to my surprise I was greeted with the following message:

The new guitar.com is in production. We hope you’ll come back to see what we’ve done, it’s pretty exciting. The new guitar.com will be a place for guitarists to interact musically and socially. We’ve developed Rype, a desktop application that allows musicians to record, edit and produce music. Rype has a social network built around it to allow musicians to collaborate, send each other music files, projects for collaboration, video chat, voice chat and instant message via Skype. Form virtual bands on guitar.com, then launch Rype, produce your songs and post them for sale on iTunes.

So it looks like guitar.com is jumping on the web 2.0 bandwagon and implementing some more social networking aspects. I am excited to see that the new site will be. As of now the forums are still up, so you can swing by there and take a look.

Also in production is a new Guitar One Magazine website, but they are not planning on being up until late March. That is a long time to have your website down if you ask me. I would think you would want to just keep the old one up while you were working on the new one.

In a previous post I said I was taking my guitar into the shop to have the intonation (among other things) set. So what is this thing called intonation?

Intonation refers to the notes on the guitar being in tune all the way from open to the high end of the fretboard. If a guitar’s intonation is set properly every E note played on the fretboard will have the proper pitch. If the intonation is off, usually the notes at the nut end of the fretboard will be correct, but they will slowly become sharp or flat the further you move up the fretboard.
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The very first guitar I had was this small acoustic that was obviously supposed to have nylon strings on it. At first I did not know about nylon strings, but later realized that because of the style of bridge, it should have had them. Anyway, my best friend and I called the guitar “The Killer”. We called it this for two reasons. Reason 1, it was a nylon string guitar that had steel strings on it so the action was really bad and it would kill your fingers if you played for too long. The second reason was because my best friend’s mom bought it from a guy who she later found out from the local newspaper was convicted of murder. The name was suiting. There was an upside to playing it though, I developed some pretty wicked calices.
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Here is todays YouTube guitar fix. This guy has done a cover of While My Guitar Gently Weeps on his Ukulele. I know, not quite a guitar, but I still think it is an amazing video. Lots of guitar players could learn a thing or two from Jake Shimabukuro’s playing. He has some amazing rhythm skills.

Here is an While My Guitar Gently Weeps Guitar Pro tab file for those of you who have Guitar Pro 5 and would like to learn it on guitar.

Enjoy.

Jimmy Page is seriously the shit. I know there are haters out there, but as far as I’m concerned he is the Godfather of Rock guitar. The Jimmy Page was doing things with music in the 60’s and 70’s that were revolutionary then. Now, they are common place. My favorite all time Page contribution has got to be the rock ballad. Stairway to Heaven is the most popular one, but he had many others including Ramble On and Over the Hills and Far Away. When I talk about a rock ballad I’m talking about a song that has a soft intro and a soft verses possibly played on acoustic guitar but then busts full out into a distorted rock chorus. Obviously like I said Stairway is the best example of this.

Some people criticize Page for being a sloppy player. The solo from Heartbreaker is an example of exactly what I’m talking about. To the untrained ear yes, it just sounds like a barrage of random notes with no reason. However, in all that chaos I hear a great solo. (more…)

I used to listen to Eric Johnson a bit a few years ago but I had forgotten all about him until I came across this video on one of my Guitar World CDs. This guy is a crazy guitar player, sort of the same style as Yngwie Malmsteen, but he plays jazz/rock not neo-classical metal.

Not only is he an excellent guitarist but this song is an example of some amazing song writing abilities.

Here is a Guitar Pro file for Cliffs of Dover for those of you who would like to try to learn it. Get your copy of Guitar Pro 5 here so that you can use this file.