Guitar
Now this is something that won't come along again. It's the favorite guitar of Jimi Hendrix. Voted by everyone from Rolling Stone to Time as the best guitar player ever, Hendrix favorite guitar was this vintage Epiphone FT79 and was “used for almost everything he composed" whilst he was in the United States. Given to a friend just before he died, it was subsequently on numerous recordings and film soundtracks including those by Dusty Springfield, Walker Brothers, Blue Mink, Paul McCartney and on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. It's coming up for auction, and is estimated to fetch GBP80,000-120,000, which seems incredibly cheap for such a piece of musical history. Read More
Gibson announces limited Firebird X with built-in effects
After a couple of weeks of Apple-esque hype, Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz gave what he calls the revolutionary the Firebird X a smashing start at the press launch in New York. Featuring built-in effects, robotic tuning and coming with wireless pedal controllers, the lightweight new model is being offered in a strictly limited run. Read More
The Rock Lock helps protect your guitar from thieving hands
For a good number of years now my trusty Kensington lock has helped give me peace of mind when out and about with the laptop. Now Chris Goulet has created a similar safety mechanism for a guitar – the Rock Lock. Any musician worried about a prized 1959 Fender Strat walking off at a gig or party can loop the heavy duty steel wire around any fixed structure or heavy equipment and lock the other end around the neck of the guitar and then go enjoy the after show party. Read More
Last year, Tone Box released a uniquely menacing overdrive unit shaped like a human skull where red LEDs lit up the orb sockets. Now the company has announced a new Skull Crusher in steel or gold finish that's being made available to retail in just ten locations in the U.S. The latest incarnation retains the useful 10dB signal boost but now offers an analog preamp that can be used to drive an amplifier or plugged directly into a recording system or mixing board. And yes, the LEDs in the eye sockets are still there too. Read More
Portable tones in a pipe: The Pipe Amp from FuzzHugger
FuzzHugger has just unleashed a portable, battery-powered amp that packs some serious volume and gorgeous 1960s fuzz tones into a pipe housing. The appropriately named Pipe Amp is about the size of a vintage effects pedal, doesn't have its own clean channel and can be used to drive a 4 x 12 cabinet. The fact that each one is hand-built and available in strictly limited quantities only adds to its must-have charm. Let the fuzz begin... Read More
When not in use, a guitar tuner is unlikely to see the light of day and is destined to spend much of its life inside a gig bag or hard case. But not giving Tascam's new tuner access to nice, bright sunlight is very bad form indeed. The battery inside the tiny TC-1S is solar charged so if it goes flat, then so do you... Read More
New guitar pickup design offers natural 3D sound
The incredible guitar virtuosity from the likes of Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson and Stanley Jordan all rely on their string-picking proficiency being registered by the instrument's pickups. These vibrations are then transformed into electrical signals and sent off to an amplifier for our listening pleasure. Using such a setup, string movement can only be read on one axis, the horizontal. The 3Dxy pickup system reads each string twice, on both the horizontal and the vertical and is said to result in a rich, surround sound effect called natural stereo. Read More
With over a million sales notched up, Roland has announced that the next generation of Cube amplifiers is ready to be let loose. The Cube XL series is available in four sizes, starting at the practice 15W version right up to a gig-worthy 80W model. The amps all feature a host of tones and effects and an auxiliary input to allow a portable music player to provide backing tracks. Features on offer from the new range include amp modeling, channel-switching and a strange-sounding power squeeze function. Roland has also unleashed a couple of BOSS guitar effects pedals – one that offers the player pitch control and voice harmony possibilities and the other squeezing some tube amp sounds into a palm-sized stomp box. Read More
Tuner manufacturing veteran Peterson Electro-Musical Products has been helping musicians keep their instruments in check since 1948, and introduced the first true bypass strobe tuner in 2004. Responding to requests from players for a snap-on tuner, the company has announced the StroboClip. The handy tuner benefits from 0.1 cent accuracy, exclusive presets for a variety of stringed and non-stringed instruments, a sturdy, road-friendly design and a pivoted clear screen that makes for easy viewing. Read More
Guitarists who like to bring a little music to city streets and maybe make a bit of extra cash on the side face the problem of having their tunes drowned out by traffic noise or carried away on the wind. Traditional amplifiers requiring a power source are no help and while there are battery-powered units around, we don’t think any are as elegant or convenient as the solution developed by Laurie Nicoll of Victoria, Australia. His sound hole amplifier, or “SHamp” is a compact amplifier that fits into the sound hole of an acoustic guitar to give it that bit of extra oomph when you need it. Read More
