Threadless just released this new T-Shirt & Hoodie, “Living in Harmony”. I think it works better as a Hoodie as the zip seperates the two halves and personally I think they should have gone all out with the electric and used a flying vee and what’s with the classical guitar? Ok I’ll stop whinging now.

The new C.F. Martin OMCRE is a new 6 string acoustic constructed using Martin’s OM body shape with a cutaway but also has the Babicz ‘Continually Adjustable Neck’ technology which means you can adjust the action using an allen key and switch between a slide action and fiatpicking action in seconds, check out the exactly how the system works here or watch the video of the neck adjustment in “action” here.

Peavey have just launched a Beta version (how very web 2.0!) of their new online custom shop guitar builder, mind you the design is more web 0.3… anyway the difference seems to be that you can now add custom graphics to the guitar by uploading a photo on the website, there doesn’t seem to be any indication to users about what the resolution of the image should be in order to be printed successfully on the guitar without the photo degrading which is a bit dodgy, some people are going to end up with very pixelated images! Nothing happened when I clicked on buy so maybe isn’t possible to really buy through this tool yet, after all it is a beta version. It doesn’t have the finesse or the design quality of the First Act online custom shop tool but it does the job, gives you a summary and a price and most importantly it is a lot of fun being able to apply your own graphics. Check out my Tay Zonday special (left), ”Chocolate Rain”.

Hi everyone, I’ve finally gotten around to using feedburner for my RSS feeds so that I can get some stats and see if anyone actually subscribes to my RSS feed! The new feed address is http://feeds.feedburner.com/GuitarNoize.

Rick Nielsen is famous for his exotic guitar collection so I wasn’t all that suprised when I saw this 6 lipstick pickup FirstAct guitar named “Bettie”.

How annoying would it be messing with 6 volume controls, 6 tone controls and 6 pickup switches (how many configurations??!!), I’d be interested to hear some of the tonal variations to come from this guitar though, you would need to put plenty of time aside to figure it all out!

I just came across this app for OS X called GuitarLog, I haven’t tried it yet but it looks pretty cool. The idea is that you structure practice sessions by using stored exercises. Each take remembers the “state” of your performance of an exercise and increments the BPM each time unless you specify otherwise.

“If you haven’t practiced an exercise for a while and don’t want to waste time listening to mistakes, you should rate all of your takes. It only takes a simple keystroke to set a rating, but can provide you with so much information as you review your practice sessions. It can also be used from the Statistics view to quickly recall the fastest tempo you’ve achieved in a particular exercise.”

You can also track which guitars were used on specific takes and see statistical graphs of your improvements. So far it is heavily geared toward reaching maximum tempo per exercise but apparently this application is still evolving so maybe it will analyse precision in the future? That would be very useful, say you had an mp3 of a riff and it checked your version against theirs at different tempos?

Anyway I can’t really tell how useful it is until I try it, so that is my plan for this weekend!

I’m not sure about the name Shark Attack Guitars it kind of implies that all your range might look like the Tiger (shark) Standard pictured left top. In fact most of the guitars are this shark fin model, although “The Great White” is slightly more curvy and the model on the site has a nice maple body. Each guitar uses a different wood for the body to give it a unique look, for instance the Tiger pictured left top uses Zebrano to give it that nice striped grain finish.

Not all the guitars are shark fin shaped however, “The Raven” pictured left bottom is a bizarre bit of carving, not sure who would request such a guitar and there is also “The Rattle and Hum” which has a rattlesnake carved into where the shark fin would normally be, again very detailed but utterly bizarre. The other main guitar is the “Barracuda” which although loosely based around a Gibson SG looks a bit odd, like the dimensions are a bit out? Anyway see for your self at www.sharkattackguitars.co.uk/.

Now I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that this guitar would sound like shit but it made me laugh and so I thought I would add it to my ever growing collection of crazy guitar designs. I particularly like the fact that not only has Flooky incorporated the main Dreamcast console but also a controller too which houses the neck pickup, very creative! I’m off to scour the web for the N64 and Playstation 1 guitar! I already found a Sega Megadrive guitar courtesy of the Brazillian band Megadriver, check out the guitar here.

I’m not sure how I keep finding these weird guitars but this is definitely one of the craziest so far! The cannibis leaf shaped guitar is by guitar manufacturer Basone Guitars and is made from bookmatched quilted western maple, a flame maple neck a Koa headstock veneer and ebony fretboard with a “joint” abalone inlay at the 12th fret. I imagine the person who buys this will spend more time staring at it giggling than actually playing it but I challenge anyone to actually play this sitting down!