Back in December the Snarling Dogs Spinslide featured on Guitar Noize, an innovative approach to solving a problem many people have with slides, what to do with it when you aren’t using it! Anyway if you didn’t see that post check it out here. I thought it was time to revisit Snarling Dogs’ website to check for any new products and was reminded of something I have been meaning to mention for a while. You can already see from the photo what I’m talking about, it is (and this is the full title) ‘The Super Bawl Whine-O-Wah “addicted to wah”’ Wah Wah! Now the most obvious thing that caught my attention was the fantastic design, whoever thought to make the pedal foot shaped was a comedy genius but this pedal is no joke, far from it. This particular model gives you a choice of 12 different wahs! I’ll hand over to Snarling Dogs for the exact description:

”Take your pick of our three basic wah sounds, WHITE ROOM (thick and Creamy), VOODOO (Midrange growl) or SHAFT (sharp and funky). Add our TWINDUCTOR BEEF BOOST to shift the frequency ranges on those three sounds to give you three entirely different wahs. Next use our HORMONE CONTROL to play the six sounds in the TESTOSTERONE (hi power) or ESTROGEN (low power) modes. That’s six sounds in each mode giving you a total of 12 different wah sounds in one wah pedal. Adjust the volume of the wah with the pre-amp volume control or even add a bit of overdrive.”

Now how many pedals do you see with a “Hormone Control”?! The Wah also has a true mechanical hard bypass switch to make sure that your signal remains untouched when you don’t need the Wah. I’m actually thinking about getting a new Wah Wah at the moment seeing as the only Wah I’ve ever owned was given to me 20 years ago and has a bit of a feedback problem so this might be just the ticket!

The Super Bawl Wine-O-Wah is available for $119 on the major US shops.

After featuring Abel Axe guitars yesterday I thought it was only fitting that I also featured one half of the Abel Axe team Mike Delaney. Mike Delaney is a custom builder of more traditional guitars and you can check out his site here. The guitar that really caught my eye was the “True Blue Lou” pictured left, this particular guitar was built for a bluesman in North Carolina. It has a maple neck with a rosewood fretboard. The swamp ash body has a black dye and a nitrocellulose lacquer finish that is so thin that the grain lines are visible which creates an amazing finish. The body is topped off with a spalted maple pickguard, I don’t think I have ever seen that before and I really like the effect I would like to see more natural wood pickguards used by manufacturers. The pickups are Seymour Duncan which have a volume, tone, blender combination with a five-way switch which gives the guitar a wide variety of tones and make the instrument very versatile. The middle pickup looks like a Duckbucker which is a Vintage output single-coil-sized humbucker excellent for country, pop, surf, rockabilly, blues, ska and classic rock and I would hazard a guess that the neck pickup and maybe the bridge pickup are Little ‘59™ humbuckers.

I have waited a long time to see Rodrigo and Gabriela after missing their last show in Sydney a couple of years ago so when I arrived at the Enmore theatre last night I was very excited. This was momentarily ruined on arrival when I realised that not only had I missed Ozomatli recently but also Buddy Guy and Keb Mo’ on March 13… gutted. After arriving late I missed the support act so I’m afraid I can’t tell you what Lauren Jane was like so I apologise to Lauren. I was quite suprised by the amount of support Rod & Gab get in Australia, the Enmore appeared to be a sell out, and where I was stood about 10 feet from the stage it was certainly packed in tight! The stage was set up with simply 2 chairs, 2 mics and 2 guitar stands, the simplicity is fantastic it makes you even more appreciative of their talent once they start playing and sound like there are couple of percussionists hidden under Gabriela’s chair!

If you have never heard of Rodrigo Y Gabriela I highly recommend you check them out, they don’t appeal to a certain age group or just to guitarists as the Enmore crowd proved. There was a complete cross section of people from young teens to 50 or 60 year olds, how often do you get that at a gig? (Well ok recent come backs by certain 80’s rock bands aside!). Their music is a fusion of South American and Flamenco with the energy and power of metal band (this is probably due to them starting out in thrash bands!) and they are famous for their arrangements of Metallica’s “Orion” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” among others. Last night they also added Metallica’s “One” into the mix. Rodrigo played his usually flurry of fast alternate picking while Gabriela stunned the crowd with her fantastic Rasgueado and percussive techniques. Personally I think she is the star of the show she has an amazing sense of rhythm, without her I probably wouldn’t have the same interest in their music. Check out one of Gabriela’s tutorials on YouTube.

After 1 1/2 hours their music does get a little repetitive, probably due to the seemingly endless rendition of Tamacun but certainly worth the wait and the money!

My favourite crowd shout of the night came after Gabriela had finished introducing the next track. “I LOOOVEEEE YOUUUUU.......as a guitarist”.

Rodrigo Y Gabriela Official Site
Rodrigo Y Gabriela’s MySpace page

I’d never heard of Abel Axe until the other day but apparently they were popular aluminum body guitars in the mid to late nineties, well they are back but they are still sorting out their website so there isn’t much information available just yet, the models section is currently empty. However, Jeff Abel has teamed up with Mike Delaney of Delaney Guitars to custom build the Abel Axe of your choice. From the T-6 Billet Aluminum bodies to the custom neck and electronics, these guitars will be built to order in their shop in Western Montana.

The guitar pictured left is the Mary Cary Abel Axe, although I couldn’t see any photos of her playing this guitar on her site, although Terrence Hansen seems to like playing 2 at once! Apparently these instruments have a powerful sustain and tone. I will bring you more information once I get it.

I thought I had Hybrid guitars pretty much covered until a comment on the latest hybrid into an ever growing choice by legendary guitar designer Jol Dantzig made me realise I had been overlooking a guitar that has been around for a very long time! It also made me realise I have only featured one Hamer guitar here on Guitar Noize which is absurd. So I give you the Hamer DuoTone Custom. This guitar was the first workable hybrid electric-acoustic created by Jol in 1991!! Now was he ahead of his time with this one or what!

”The acoustic pickup utilizes a kynar cable sensor feeding into an onboard preamp with fully adjustable threeband equalizer. The magnetic pickups are time-tested Duncan humbuckers selected for this application, and together with the rosewood bridge, provide a truly warm electric sound. A full duplex output allows you to rout each signal to a separate discrete sound system, or to join them together.”

The DuoTone is a really great looking guitar due to its archtop spruce top complete with traditional f-hole and sunburst finish and lets you switch between or combine electric and acoustic sounds at the flick of a switch. Now the other hybrids don’t seem quite so groundbreaking do they?

Boss recently announced their new SL-20 Slicer pedal at the 2008 Frankfurt music show, Musikmesse so I thought I would check out the demo videos. First of all the heading on the pedal homepage is “Instant Audio Adrenaline” and I can’t help but wonder if it is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Roger Linn’s Adrenalinn? Now what this pedal does is only a small fraction of what the ArenaLinn III does but I thought the arpeggiated sequences seemed very reminiscent. The SL-20 has fifty rhythmic patterns are onboard, with adjustable note attack and duration, plus harmonic slice effects, play the sliced sounds in realtime while capturing them with Loop Record.

”An internal tap-tempo feature is included, as well as the ability to sync to external MIDI clock. Sound characteristics of the SL-20 such as attack, duration, effect level, and direct level can be controlled by the onboard knobs or from an external Expression pedal.”

To really understand what this pedal is about check out the Demos page and watch a few of the quicktime videos, it will make a lot more sense once you see it being used.

Ibanez fans will remember a while ago the announcement of the H R Giger series which was in my opinion a little disappointing as it was little more than a painted RG. This time Ibanez have done better with the RGHRG1. The Basswood body has been laser-engraved with textured scales and the fretboard inlays depict an alien spine. The volume and tone pots are skulls which are a little cheesy but they are H.R. Giger’s version of skulls so they look pretty cool and the bridge humbucker is also engraved with “H.R. Giger”. The only thing that is wrong with this guitar is the budget hardware, the Edge III trem regarded as one of the worst trems in existence among many an Ibanez afficianado and the Ibanez INF pickups should really have been replaced with something with more grunt maybe Seymour Duncan’s or DiMarzio but these things are replaceable. All in all this is a pretty mean looking guitar and I would be interested to see what they set as a retail price is because you would really need to spend a few hundred on upgrading hardware.

Back in November I posted about the Gibson Robot Guitar, a limited 4000 of this groundbreaking guitar were made and proved to be a great success even though they only came in that bright blue sunburst colour and cost about $4,000. Well it seems they were more popular than even Gibson predicted as they have just announced 2 new “Robot” models, and although they are both called “Ltd” it would apear they are fully fledged production models. First up is the Robot Les Paul Studio Ltd which is a mere $3,999 and the second is the Robot SG Special Ltd weighing in at a slightly more affordable $3,599.

Both of these guitars come with the same Powertune hardware that made the original Robot Guitar so unique, Powertune control knobs, Powertune tuners and Powertune bridge. The SG has a Carbon Fiber pickguard which looks, well modern I suppose… hard to describe against that Purple Metallic finish, but don’t worry they are also available in Metallic Green! Seriously what are Gibson thinking? They seem to be tailoring the look of these guitars for teenagers with a price tag of a boutique hand made guitar not a factory production model. I would rather spend the money on a Hamer Standard Custom and know that it has been hand crafted with the highest attention to detail and no fancy gadgets taking up the cost, but thats just me.

Both the “Robots” share similar construction with Ebony fretboard on a mahogany neck and while the SG has a solid Mahogany body the Les Paul differs slightly with a mix of Mahogany and Maple. I’m no expert but at this price I think that eventually the bubble will burst once the initial hype has calmed down and all the highly paid executives who can actually afford these instruments have got their bright green and purple self tuning instruments lying in their cases. Having said all that, the Les Paul Standard has a similar price tag, again too much in my opinion but then I have never seen their production process so maybe I’m being a bit hard on them!

I had the fortune of checking out this amp the other day and had to feature it because 1) it’s an amazing amp and 2) the front lights up! Okay so the fact that the Hughes & Kettner logo seems to magically light up blue along with the amp model name and all this on a completely clear front so you can see the 4 EL34’s in the poweramp and the 9 12AX7’s in the preamp could be considered a bit over the top, others however may consider it to be the icing on the cake for this beast. Once those tubes start glowing it creates quite an amazing image along with the neon blue.

”This definitive all-tube, Custom Class amp puts the most sought-after sounds in amp history at your fingertips. It’s all there, from vintage Californian clean to ‘60s British jangle and from classic rock tones to nu metal meltdown

Each of the amp sections features two channels, dedicated 3-band EQ and Master controls. Remote channel switching comes courtesy of the included Stageboard. The built-in effects loop is configurable in serial or parallel mode, and the optional MSM-1 MIDI module adds remote MIDI switching capabilities.”

Make sure you check out the demo (click on the demo link on this page) for a close up view of the front and back of the 100 watt head along with plenty of audio demos played through a Strat and a Les Paul so you get a single coil and humbucker demo respectively.

Strangely there is no real background information about Black Machine but the guitars really stand out. There are a few models currently available according to the website but seeing as I have featured quite a few 7 and 8 string guitars in the past and a couple of fan fret guitars so I’ll let you browse Black Machine yourself for their specials I want to focus on the 6 string B2.

The B2 pictured left has an amazingly thin profile as you can see which is 28-30mm of Swamp Ash depending on the weight, this also comes with an optional 2mm Ebony top and who wouldn’t want that it looks visually stunning! None of the Black Machine guitars are painted, all are natural wood finish so the timbers chosen are incredibly important. To top the body off you have a choice of a cream, ivoroid or black binding. The pickups are chosen by consultation with the customer which I think is a nice touch, if you are going to spend the money on a custom model like this it is important that you are going to get exactly the right pickup sound and I’m sure Black Machine have plenty of suggestions.

The neck is Honduras Rosewood, the grain is aligned with Ebony fillets on laminated necks with a two way Gotoh trussrod. Fingerboards and headstocks are Honduras or Indian Rosewood or Ebony again with either Cream, Ivoroid or Black binding. So much choice! Oh and you also get a choice of chrome, black or gold hardware (Schaller and Gotoh). and optional Ebony or Pearl tuning keys!