Guitar Noize - guitar news, crazy guitar designs and cool guitar videos

I just came across this link over at Boing Boing to a Flickr Pool of hand made guitar picks. I thought this was a really cool idea although I’m not sure about cardboard picks! This person, sorry I don’t know a name just the Flickr username Aud1073cH, has actually used bits of old laptops, old photos, plastic packaging etc.

It would be pretty easy for you to do the same, simply trace around your guitar pick on a photo or magazine page, cut it out and stick it on the pick with superglue or something. I do prefer his more adventurous picks though like the air vent from a Toshiba laptop!

While you are there check out some of Aud1073cH’s other creations!

Albert Lee is the most successful English Country Music guitarist in history, with a string of awards including a Grammy and more album releases than you can shake a stick at! Albert has appeared with everyone from the late great Bo Diddley, to Eric Clapton to Dolly Parton. Albert was born in 1943 in Leominster, Herefordshire not too far down the road from where I grew up! In April 2008 while on tour in France, Albert Lee suffered a bad fall in Paris when he misjudged a curb, falling forward breaking his humerus in two places. Albert was scheduled to appear at the Institute of Contemporary Music and Performance in London. Well good news, Albert has fully recovered and has rescheduled! He will be giving an exclusive Masterclass on July 6th during the Institute’s Country Weekend. So if you love country guitar, or you just want to see this living guitar legend in the flesh then this unmissable weekend of pickin’ heaven is for you! For more information contact The Institute and reserve your place.

“Participants on this fantastic 2-day programme will learn new tips, tricks and skills in classes and workshops with the Institute’s very own country guitar experts Lee Hodgson, Dario Cortese and Andy Saphir. And there will be plenty of opportunity to put the learning straight into practice in live band workshops and jam sessions in some of the best teaching and performing facilities in London.

Albert will be joining the second day of the programme on Sunday 6th July, for an exclusive, personalised masterclass - an opportunity to get up close and personal to a real legend! Course dates are July 5th & 6th; contact the Institute now to reserve your place!“

Check out Albert Lee on YouTube.
Albert Lee Official Site

I really thought I’d seen it all in my quest to find the craziest most expensive guitars on the planet and then I receive a mysterious email alerting me about Precious Rebels Custom Guitars. Well ok it wasn’t completely mysterious, it turns out it was sent to me by one of the artists involved in these crazy creations. Dunbar Studios’ artists who meticulously apply by hand genuine Swarovski Austrian Crystals creating unique playable artwork!

All instruments are fitted with RFID technology, documented and security catalogued by Dunbar Studios to ensure collectors they are in possession of a genuine art work. Now that is something you don’t get on your bog standard 6 string! Well there is a reason, these guitars don’t come cheap, hence why they are in my Really Expensive Guitars category. The guitars start at $15,000 and apparently go up to $60,000 so you better start putting your spare pennies aside. They are the ultimate bling guitars but I don’t think you will see many played on stage, if at all I would be too scared to knock the crystals off!

Check out the video presentation on the Precious Rebels™ site in order to see the guitartworks in all their shimmering glory.

The competition to win a signed copy of Prashant Aswani’s album “Revelation - Fully Loaded”. Thank you to everyone for entering but in the words of Highlander, there can be only one! So congratulations to the chosen one Stanford Axle!

Prashant sent me a video of his appearance at the Melbourne music conference CMI Frontrunner 2008 last week so check out this track Rugburn which is a sneak peek from Prashant’s forthcoming album “Time”.

I have just been loaned a Vox AmPlug AC30 by Rob from Dirt Loco so that I can review it for Guitar Noize, thanks Rob. The AmPlug is a very simple and clever idea, it simply plugs into your guitar where you would normally plug in your guitar lead from your amp, plug in a pair of headphones and if you want to play along some music, use the Aux input to plug in your iPod. The unit is powered by 2 AAA batteries which come included so it really is a plug and play device! Once it is plugged in you use the 3 control wheels on the underside of the unit to control the Volume, Gain and Tone.

So how does it sound? Well don’t expect a completely faithful representation of the AC30 they haven’t been able to miniaturise the 8 Tubes used in the AC30! But considering the size and price of this product you get a pretty good sound! I got the best results using the neck pickup on my Patrick Eggle Berlin Stage which is a Seymour Duncan SH-2. With the Gain and Tone up full and the volume on about half I was wailing SRV licks, it sounded almost as good as plugging my headphones into my Vox AD50VT! Using my bridge humbucker, a Seymour Duncan SH-14 the sound was a little less inspiring, I really wanted more overdrive but then that is why the other 2 models exist, the Classic Rock and the Metal!

With the Gain rolled all the way back to one the sound was a little noisy but I was still able to get a decent clean sound, not that I play on clean very often! To be honest I lasted about 2 minutes before cranking it up switching to the neck pickup and attempting some Scott Henderson blues runs! If I have 1 criticism and Rob felt this too, it could do with a little Reverb and seeing as they have plenty of DSP experience I imagine it won’t be long until they manage to include this as a standard feature. This is a great tool for practicing without annoying everyone in the house, and with the device being so compact it makes for a perfect travel amp!

UPDATE: If you are going to use this as a travel amp you will need a travel guitar so make sure you check out the DeVillain.

Whilst reviewing Infinite Guitar I watched a video lesson by instructor Rick Graham where he plays and breaks down a piece called “Andromeda” by Marco Sfogli. I hadn’t heard of Marco so I did a quick google search and discovered Marco Sfogli’s website which has details of his solo album “There’s hope” as well as his signature guitar, the Rash MT Monster Marco Sfogli Signature. You can find this guitar in the products section on Rash Guitars’ site I am unable to link directly to the page because they decided to build their site with Flash without any kind of deep linking strategy in place (note to Rash Guitars’ webmaster, check out ‘swfaddress‘).

This Marco Sfogli Signature guitar is available in 2 versions, the Standard and the Pro. Both come loaded with DiMarzio pickups, although the Standard has an Air Norton (neck) and a D-Sonic (bridge), whereas the Pro comes with a Cruiser in the neck and middle position and a D-Sonic in the bridge position. The Standard bridge is a Licensed Gotoh Floyd Rose and the Pro has a Hipshot trem with Piezo saddles. The top has a 4mm quilted Poplar top and a 4mm flamed maple top on the Pro. Both versions have 24 jumbo frets on the 16” radius Ebony fretboard. The tuners are Gotoh on the Standard and Sperzel on the Pro. And finally the body is Light Poplar on the Standard and Mahogany on the Pro.

You could of course just go for the non-signature MT Monster which is similar to the Standard described above except it uses Rash’s own Alnico pickups and has an interesting burst colour similar to the Steve Morse signature Music Man which they call “Poison”.

There is a new contender in the online guitar video tuition called Infinite Guitar, as I have previously mentioned on Guitar Noize there are loads of great resources for learning guitar on the internet these days and with broadband internet comes video streaming and ongoing access to the kind of tuition that has never before been available to guitarists. I was very fortunate to be given unlimited access for a week by Infinite Guitar instructor Sean Conklin to Infinite Guitar’s large collection of lessons in order to review and assess how useful this site is to the average guitar player. Now Infinite Guitar is a fairly new enterprise, I believe launched in March 2008 but they have made sure that they had plenty of video lessons online to make the site immediately useful to players of all levels. For a start the site has a group of very talented instructors from around the globe all proficient in a variety of styles from the high energy shredding techniques of Sean Conklin and Rick Graham to the melodic Jazz techniques of Mike Edwin and everything in between including acoustic and classical lessons.

Infinite Guitar makes it very easy to choose lessons by style, ability, exercises, theory etc. or by instructor. Once you choose a lesson, all associated lessons are listed in a drop down for easy access and suggestions for other similar lessons are located at the bottom of the page. Each lesson has accompanying tab which can be easily printed and saved to your favourites and this is displayed below the video player so you may want to download the pdf to open in a new window so that you can position it on your screen next to the video so you can follow along with the instructor. The technical ability of all the instructors is very high, the kind of level of playing that makes you wonder why you don’t own their solo album yet! I seem to have gravitated towards Sean and Rick’s lessons going with their rock and metal lessons and in particular I liked how Sean uses his own compositions to illustrate techniques so you are learning examples within the context of the music. They are the modern day equivalent to studies that classical guitar composers such as Fernando Sor and Heitor Villa-Lobos created to improve pupils technique. For example his composition, “Fahrenheit” includes fast legato phrasing, alternate picking and sweep arpeggios and pose enough of a challenge for the more advanced guitarist while breaking it down to slow speeds for the beginner. Each example is shown at full speed, then at a slower tempo with different camera angles helping you really see how the example is being picked and fingered and if for some reason there is something you don’t fully understand there is a forum where you can ask the instructor questions.

All this tuition obviously comes at a price, these guys have to make something for lessons as valuable as this and I think for such a new venture they are off to a really great start. A great balance of instructors focussing on techniques and exercises useful to all guitarists I think in particular rock and metal guitarists will really have a lot to get their teeth into! So down to the nitty gritty, how much? Well for only $8.25/month you get unlimited access to all of the 549 lessons currently on the site and this number is ever expanding. The guys even take requests in their forums so you can get exactly what you want such Rick Graham’s “In the style of Guthrie Govan”. I really can’t fault what Infinite Guitar has achieved so far, the site design needs a little tweaking all those silver gradients look a bit dodgey and the video player could do with a little design refinement but these are all visual enhancements that I’m sure will happen as the site grows.

So why not head over and check out the 10 free lessons available at Infinite Guitar and make your own mind up!