If you are looking for a Telecaster but you are bored of the usual standard finishes and paintjobs then you need to check out Girl Brand Guitars, I don’t understand the name, no they aren’t guitars just for girls… just look will you! Now the website is a little confusing but click around and you will see some very unique Telecasters. There are of course a few which particularly caught my eye such is my obsession with the more, well leftfield of guitar designs!

The photo on the left is a guitar called “SushiGirl” which uses the hollows of the Telecaster body to house sushi like a Bento box complete with mother of pearl, abalone and recon stone fretboard inlays depicting a Giant Squid attacking some fish! Now this guitar is currently offline which Chris Larsen from Girl Brand Guitars has explained is due to a spiteful server not playing nice so in an unprecedented move for Guitar Noize I am including a second image which is a close up of the inlays here:

The neck is 25.5” scale and the fretboard is ebony or cocobola over hard maple and has a double acting truss rod fitted. I had to look this up to see what that meant, I found a good explanation here on the PRS Guitars site. And hey, if its good enough for Paul Reed Smith! This was the explanation for the body of the guitar that I received from Chris:

Body- back- linen phenolic over birch ply, core-fir
top- wood, metal, plastic, whatever.
Rim- extruded aluminum, nickle-plated bronze knee cap

Oh and finally the pickups are hand wound by Dave Schecter. I’ll be bringing you another of Chris Larsen’s creations tomorrow!

When I first saw this I nearly had a minor cardiac arrest as I thought somebody had hacked up a perfectly good Takamine guitar, on closer inspection I was slightly and still only very slightly relieved to see it is a Jasmine, the cheap end of the Taka range. Still! What the hell?! Why would anyone take a guitar and turn it into a PC… a PC?! of all things, at least make it into a Mac or an iPod or something jeez… Actually I take that back… please don’t, only PC users would do something so sacreligous.

Aside from upsetting me by torturing a perfectly good instrument I was quite impressed with the conversion in a sick kind of way, but no as impressed with the CD tray as the owner seems to be?! Check it out here, there is a video of the guy repeatedly opening and closing the CD tray with a remote as if remote controls had just been invented.

This gas can acoustic lapsteel will set you back a mere $600, which for a gas can is pretty expensive but for a lapsteel? Look its the best of both worlds, you can use it as a travel guitar and if you run out of petrol… well you get the idea. Just don’t smoke and play or things could get a little messy.

There isn’t a lot of info about Borjorquez guitars or Esteban Bojorquez himself on his site, its just a wee blog hosted on blogspot but I can tell you that he describes himself as “Equal portions of early early Spanish settler, aboriginal Californian, modern Malibu master, surfboard designer, and contemporary artiste.” which I found on one of his other websites The Art of Bojorquez which is also worth checking out. He has designed and built heaps of lapsteel guitars from traditional to the one pictured to the left another of his gas can creations that caught my eye was The Road Warrior 5 Gallon Gas Can Hollow Body Slide for $800. Very unique.

I just created my first RiffCast using Sonoma Riffworks. It is a very simple process, once you are happy with your song (well I wasn’t totally happy with my song but I’m still messing around to see what I can do, and I’m not much of a song writer) you simple click Riffcast, fill in some details about the track such as the name and names of the people who recorded on it and then enter your username and password and click submit and wait for it to create your Riffcast. In my case it took about 10 seconds and then I received an email with a link to my Riffcast page and the main Riffcast page was also updated with my Riff. It’s not great but it’s about 2 hours of sitting in front of my laptop with my Takamine TEAN46C acoustic and using Amplitube Live 2 which comes with Riffworks standard to process my guitar sound.

This is a strange looking guitar and it’s not just the design that is a little different, the body is carbon fibre over cedar (that is why it looks like one piece of wood, the neck is set seperately and then the entire guitar covered in carbon fibre), the fretboard is made from cocobolo and the pickups have a 6 way rotary switch to control them which can create a combination of sounds plus an added boost switch which brings in two humbucker tones! The finish is acrylic and bright chrome and satin anodise hardware.

No idea what these guitars sound like but there are a few good reviews on the site, Guitarist Magazine had this to say back in 2000:

”Sonically, however, it’s astonishingly traditional. The bright, clear tones from the Gus tubes, which are custom wound by Kent Armstrong, are bell-like and woody, and… well, very Fendery.Harmonics ring out clear and true, even from the neck unit, and the extra bridge-plus-neck position on the switch is particularly impressive. Great for spacious rhythm parts, funky partial chords and arppeggiated progressions.”

There are more reviews here. 

This strange looking guitar I found on Elderly Instruments’ website looks like a log they have just picked up and decided to turn into a guitar, but then it is supposed to pay homage to Michigan’s lumber legacy so thats probably why! Not my cup of tea but at least it is unique. The guitar was built by Scott Sather and features a maple body, bolt-on maple neck, 22-fret rosewood fingerboard with dot inlays, 6-in-a-line Gotoh tuners, 2 Seymour Duncan humbucking pickups, wood pickup rings, 3-way toggle switch, master volume and tone control, fixed top-load bridge weighs in at 8.2 lbs (thats 3.7Kg in the civilized - or should that be civilised world) and will only knock you back 650 of your United States Dollerage!

I have found a few really expensive guitars but I’m always looking to add to this category. Now this model just about qualifies as I think anything less than $10,000 is still a plausible purchase for some people (unfortunately not me!) and $10 - 20 is expensive but not REALLY expensive. The PRS 10th Anniversary Private Stock Custom 22 will set you back $23,000 now to put that into some kind of perspective, that is almost the same price as the EVH Frankenstein replica!

So why is it so pricey? Well it certainly isn’t because of the Deluxe Suede Hardshell Case that comes with this instrument, although that is a nice addition. Maybe it is the custom inlays that depict the last 10 years or the custom engraved pickup covers, rosewood tuning buttons and pickup rings and green ripple abalone? Or maybe the gold hardware, black and ivoroid along the fingerboard or the body detail finished in Mother of Pearl. Well it is all of these things of course but also that this is a private stock instrument that has all of these extra details. The PRS Private Stock guitars use woods that are set aside as the “best of the best” or “Paul’s Private Stash”!

This paragraph from PRS’ site explains the private stock philosophy:

”The woods are carefully picked from our “Private Stash” and these extraordinary pieces of wood are some of the best instrument grade woods found on the planet. Each guitar is stained with a complex special technique to bring out the most figure and create a unprecedented three dimensionality. The instrument is carefully guided through each craftsman’s hands, and finally checked by Paul and myself to ensure the best instrument possible. Each instrument is signed by Paul and receives a Private Stock number along with a letter of authenticity describing the specifications and feature of that particular instrument.”

You would be forgiven for thinking at first glance that this is a chromed-up Ibanez Jem, well you would be wrong but but its not too far off. First of all here is a link to a full set of photos and an explanation from the guy who created it. But I will summarise what he did here. First he stripped his Variax 500 to use the hardware and electronics from it. Then he bought an almost new RG neck off Ebay and sent the Body of the Variax and the Neck to Sims Custom who re-cut the Variax body into the shape of a Jem. He finished the guitar in black with a mirror top, shaved 3mm off the headstock and finished it with the mirror finish, put a graphtec nut on the neck and fitted the blue leds.

The resulting hybrid is a pretty cool looking guitar (if you like Ibanez guitars obviously!) but I reckon it would be a pain in the arse to keep fingerprint free!

Here is a new Threadless T-Shirt called “Justified And Amplified” by Mike Harding. I really think the nun needs a few stomp boxes in front of her don’t you?

I’m quite lazy it has to be said. I’ve owned a mac or two for the last 3 or 4 years and not once have I recorded anything in GarageBand, why? Well by the time I’ve loaded it up and plugged in my Takamine I’ve started to lose interest. Then I’m searching around for a decent drum loop to jam to and well its all over and I’m online searching for cool guitars before I know it. Well I don’t have that excuse anymore because I am now the proud owner of Sonoma Wireworks - Riffworks! If you haven’t heard of this product I encourage you to watch this video or search YouTube for videos tagged with “Riffworks”.

Ok done that? Impressed? Skeptical? Ok so that video is edited a little in order to make it nice and snappy but believe me the first 2 riffs the guy lays down are realtime, Riffworks only records a new layer when it has a signal so you can wait for a couple of repeats then start playing and it will instantly record your next take. Ok I’m getting ahead of myself… This is a really fun bit of software, it really takes me back to when my brother and I got our first 4-track (Yamaha MT100II) and started recording song after song. The key to Riffworks is that it has been tailored to creating songs by Riffs (not suprisingly!). So you can just keep adding layer after layer without touching the computer and it keeps each take which you can also set to mute as it finishes so that you can do multiple takes. The next thing that makes it so great is a little feature called Instant Drummer™ which lets you dial up a drum loop and with the turn of a dial alter the intensity of the playing and the variation of the pattern. This is left to the creators of the drum patches to interpret as they wish but it is so easy to find a drum track to jam along to. These drum patches are available as add-ons from the website at $9.99 a set so be prepared to outlay a few extra dollars to get the right mix of loops to keep the creative juices flowing.

When you create a layer, say an 8 bar riff in 4/4, you can add and remove effects to this layer. The effects are pretty amazing, you could quite literally use riffworks as your main signal processor for recording without using any other features they are that good! They aren’t just your run of the mill reverbs and delays either there are some very creative units like the Attaq and Tempest modules. I was stuck playing with those two for hours!! Oh and did I mention that the standard version comes with Amplitube 2 Live? Oh my… When you plug in to Riffworks you can choose to use hardware monitoring or if you prefer, run it through the effects first. Please, please make sure you do this it is soo good. Select Amp and use Amplitube to create a head and cabinet to get your sound started, then you can either use Amplitube’s stomp boxes which are good or you can use Riffworks effects which are great. Although I found myself making silly noises far too often because it was fun! I plugged my Takamine TEAN46C directly into my Macbook Pro and used Amplitube to create a nice Amp and then played around with Riffworks effects to create a couple of tracks and a bass track using the Tripwire effects module to detune my guitar an octave. You can hear the results of an hours messing around here and believe me it really doesn’t do this software justice!!

Once you create a riff it is really easy to then put them together to create a song, just by dragging and dropping onto the song timeline. You can even create songlayers which are not riff based so that you can lay down solos or vocals. However this is not Riffworks’ main focus and it is tricky to edit the volume throughout a songlayer for instance if you wanted to splice two together, you might be better creating a few and then exporting them to Ableton Live or something for more detailed wave editing. I think if I coupled this with something like Abelton Live I would pretty much have a perfect set up for a very small amount of cash. There is a lot more to this software like the online collaboration and sharing functionality but I really recommend you just download the demo and check it out for yourself. I’m off to try and emulate Eddie’s “Brown sound” and write me a VH classic!