I can’t enter the Guitar World/Peavey Design your own guitar contest because I’m not a US citizen… gutted. Oh well, I decided to design my own entry anyway so here it is, the Peavey Guitar Noize model! I know I have mentioned the Peavey online guitar builder before with my nod to Tay Zonday but I reckon this one looks pretty cool.

I’ve mentioned the EVH Frankenstein replica guitar before but as I’ve just read The Van Halen Saga book I thought not only was it worth revisiting but I wanted to add it to my Really Expensive Guitars category now that I’ve seen the price tag! Are you sitting down? Ok so first of all there are only 300 of these guitars in production hence the rather inflated price and it is a much closer replica than anything else he’s ever seen or played according to Eddie.

The price? $25,000. And yes that is US dollars so a direct translation in Australian dollars is $29,000. That’s a pretty hefty price tag for a guitar that Eddie once described as a piece of shit!

I love the ‘50’s hot rod styling of this guitar, it is a Campbell American Guitars - Nelsonic Transitone quite a mouthful! Blinged up with gold hardware, gold Gotoh roller bridge trem and Sperzel gold locking machine heads. This guitar is a souped up version of the Transitone for those who prefer their guitars a little more understated. The Transitone only has 1 pickguard which also a different style and chrome hardware to reduce a bit of that gold glare! Also the body is Basswood as standard rather than the more exotic Honduran mahogany with a red nitro cellulose lacquer on the Nelsonic.

A little while ago I mentioned Shark Attack Guitars which had obviously been inspired by Sharks but this one goes a little further, the headstock of this guitar is shaped and painted like a shark tail and the body as you can see has full shark graphics. I imagine it is pretty uncomfortable to play sitting down let alone standing up but if you are into gimmick guitars and Mako sharks then this will set you back around $300.

I never thought I would be including a Classical Concert guitar in my Crazy Guitar Designs Category but then I’ve never seen a classical guitar stray from the shape that has been used since the 18th century before! I myself own a Michael Gee Classical Guitar that I bought whilst studying for my Music Degree and noone would have ever thought to even play a guitar with a cutaway let alone a guitar that changes the soundhole shape!

However this Scharpach guitar has been in development for 15 years and incorporates unique construction like the double sound-table resonator, separated by a bracing system from the back of the guitar and the semi-cutaway. The Sharpach has been designed to produce an impressively full and broad tonal spectrum as opposed to the traditional midtone range of a traditional classical guitar. The neck has been reinforced with Carbon Fibre which increases sustain and tone. Due to the unique semi-cutaway and the raised fingerboard it is for the first time possible on a classical instrument to have really easy access, even to the highest registers and still maintain a nice tone.

You can check out a video of Nadja Kossinskaja playing a Cedar Scharpach here.

This guitar by Koll Guitars looks like a shark has taken a bite out of it, but obviously it is actually designed to accomodate the tuning pegs as this guitar has no headstock! For a start you don’t see many hollowbody guitars like this without a headstock but to carve the tuners into the guitar and make a 7 string model like this makes it a very striking creation!

It is apparently “ergonomically designed” to sit comfortably on your leg and creates a good neck angle. It is primarily an electric but has great acoustics because it is a hollowbody archtop. Each instrument is custom made and the only information I could find was that it is $4500.00 and no orders are currently being taken and not many have been made so they are pretty rare.

I was going to crop this guitar so that I didn’t have to write as much but I couldn’t do it I just think that headstock is far too nice to chop off!

I’ve always been a fan of the Washburn N4 Nuno Bettencourt model thanks to the natural wood finish of the aged solid alder body on the vintage and the chunky reverse headstock with just a little nod to the vintage strat. Washburn are currently enjoying a solid resurgence thanks to their focus on creating great rock guitars. After 120 years of making guitars they are still probably overlooked by most people but the current roster of endorsees is probably changing opinions at the moment. The most obvious is the aformentioned Nuno Bettencourt but also wielding a custom Washburn is Scott Ian from Anthrax and Nick Cantese of Black Label Society which by the way if you haven’t seen it already there is a great video podcast from the Chicago Guitar Shop on the making of Nick’s “Shot To Hell” guitar.

Anyway to get to my point, I came across this beautiful guitar whilst browsing their site and I haven’t seen it in the shops anywhere here in Sydney, Australia which is very upsetting because I would love to get my hands on this guitar and see what it sounds like. The finish is amazing, I particularly like the pictured X50 PROFE with the flamed maple carved top and gloss finish it also has that fantastic headstock borrowed from Nuno and switched round the normal way, a set neck and the very cool string thru body. I would switch the EMG’s for the Seymour Duncan’s on the X50 PRO but thats just a personal perference. The Trans Black finish looks amazing like a deep tobacco flame rather than black, very nice.

And there was me worrying that I wouldn’t have enough to write?!

It’s been a while since I posted anything furniture related so now is a good time to resurrect the guitar related furniture category!

This guitar bar stool is made by Fire Seating and is a strat shape available in a variety of powdercoat finishes but surely you all want the root beer finish? There are also plenty of upholstery options all of which are guaranteed not to enhance your playing so stop blaming the stool and get back to practicing your phrygian dominant 3 octave arpeggio sweep!

I first picked up the guitar in 1988 at the age of 12, and at the time I was just getting into rock and metal. The first tab book was Iron Maiden’s ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’ which my dad bought me as a present one day and I thought it had the most amazing guitar playing ever, I still love that album and I still think the guitar playing on it is great but something happened which changed the way I thought and played… my friend lent me a video called ”Live Without a Net” a live concert of Van Halen in their 1986 Sammy Hagar early days. At this point I had heard ”OU812” and thought it was quite good. This video introduced me to some earlier Van Halen material and gave me some of the best guitar lessons I’ve ever had. I studied Eddie’s playing for hours and hours, learned vibrato and the tapping part of eruption by the end of the year and was well on my way to becoming a EVH clone, I didn’t even realise at this point that David Lee Roth was anything other than a solo artist with the guy out of crossroads! Anyway I soon looked up the old Van Halen but I was 12, the new stuff sounded pretty good to me and “Eat ‘em And Smile” was one of my favourite albums.

As I got older the early Van Halen soon became my favourite era and with the recent news of a Van Halen reunion tour with Diamond Dave announced there could be no better time for the release of a book like Everybody Wants Some - The Van Halen Saga. I was really excited when the book arrived I immediately played Van Halen 1 in iTunes to get me in the mood. I knew that there had been a lot of disruption in the band over the years and I knew that DLR was a bit of an egomaniac but it is really interesting to actually get a background of what really happened from year to year. Its amazing that they are still alive considering how much Jack Daniels and beer was consumed (Eddie I’m looking at you...) mind you Sammy has apparently become a bit of a Tequila monster in recent years!

The book written by Ian Christe chronicles the lives of Van Halen from the beginning and I’m talking straight off the boat from Holland kind of beginning. There is so much to cram into one book that it understandbly moves along at a pretty fast pace, personally I could have read the unedited version happily! The first section starts off in the early Whisky a go go years as the guys worked the club circuits continually in LA and built a solid foundation of support, it then moves along to the Van Hagar era and the ups of downs of touring with an alcoholic guitarist in full flight and then moves through the Cherone erm, well not era, detour, and then through the last few years of rumour and speculation up to the present day just before the tour was officially announced.

I don’t need to go into detail you know the ups and downs of Van Halen, the squabbling between Roth and Hagar and more recently Eddie and Hagar and poor Michael Anthony… I feel sorry for the guy he always got the raw end of the deal and now he’s been replaced by a 16 year old! Well okay it is no ordinary 16 year old is it, Wolfgang Van Halen is set to be a star of the future according to his dad apparently they have been writing material in 5150 for years!

Even if you aren’t a Van Halen fan, if you ever liked “Runnin’ with the devil”, “Unchained”, “Panama” or even “Poundcake” you have to have to read this book, I’m recommending it to all my friends, I enjoyed it as much as “Motley Crue - The Dirt”! If it wasn’t true it would be a great fictional story and thats what makes it so good, Van Halen has been going for nearly 30 years and its a true rock ‘n’ roll story of excess and debauchery, one of the longest running soap operas in rock history!

I guarantee you’ll be listening to “eruption” within minutes of opening the book!

I’m a little worried, I just read over at one of my favourite guitar blogs Guitar MX that Hugh Manson from Manson Guitars is building guitars specifically for the Led Zeppelin reunion gig in November. Now Hugh Manson is a very talented luthier but are we going to see Jimmy Page running around playing this Manson toilet seat creation? No of course we aren’t but it made for a nice photo and blog title, in fact Hugh has apparently made quite a few Bass guitars for John Paul Jones over the years so maybe we will only see Manson Basses at the reunion? I can’t see Jimmy switching his Les Paul really.

I’d never heard of Manson Guitars before but they seem to be mainly Strat or Tele shaped and lots of nice flame and quilted maple. Check out his current range at MansonGuitars.co.uk