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

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a 7 string PRS guitar before, I’m sure someone must have ordered one through the Custom Shop at some point but it’s cool to see Dave Weiner sporting a very fine model he even has his name on the Truss Rod cover plate. I wonder if this is the basis for a new PRS model?

Photos courtesy of Kevin Geier who attended “A Night Of Pure Guitar” with Dave Weiner and Rob Balducci in Cleveland.

Check out my review of Dave Weiner’s latest album “On Revolute”.

Updated with video demo!

Rob “Chappers” Chapman affectionately known as “The Monkey Lord” (his band is called Monkey Lord) is an interesting fella, I wasn’t aware of him until he ran a YouTube solo contest that sparked a lot of interest so I subscribed to his YouTube channel to see what else he was up to. Now Rob is much more than just a YouTube personality Rob is a very talented guitarist and clinician who has been endorsed by ESP Guitar and Orange Amps in the past but he cleverly used his internet presence to build up a loyal following initially from his students and their friends and now on a global scale.

Last year Rob announced that he was going to start his own guitar company called Chapman Guitars, a bold venture in the current financial climate, and enlisted the services of UK Luthier Jaden Rose to build guitars for Chapman Guitars. The most interesting thing about the ML1 and the recently designed ML2 is that they are a collaborative design, every part of the design process was carried out as an online voting process on the Chapman Guitars website and every detail was included from body shape, neck joint, headstock shape and of course the finish. The final voting led to the ML2 which you can see in the video above, as with the ML1 the voters decided on the price category which obviously led to certain decisions about hardware. Rob’s philosophy is that the ML1 and ML2 are high quality base guitars which you can then upgrade to make into something a little more on the epic side of guitar town. The ML1 is available for £299, the ML2 will be available from £350 for the Standard model, however there will be Custom and Private Stock models available too but only 250 will be made so get your order in fast. If you are looking for something a little more high end and pointy then the 2nd collaboratively designed guitar was the Ghost Fret, a Korina Explorer that is built for speed and available in a number of different colour options.

I think this business model is very interesting and quite revolutionary in the guitar industry and I think Chappers is onto a winner!

For more information about the guitars visit - http://www.chapmanguitars.co.uk
For more information on the Simian overlord visit - http://www.monkeylord.co.uk

When you have been around as long as Joe Perry from Aerosmith you earn the right to have an epic guitar rig, Joe’s guitar tech Trace Foster takes Dunlop’s Brian Kehoe through the monster rig and guitar collection. Joe actually seems to take some rare and collectible amps and guitars on tour with him, gear that most of us would probably be too afraid to take out of the house but and I love that, guitars and amps aren’t meant to be played!

Thanks to DunlopTV for sharing this great video. - www.jimdunlop.com

UPDATE: Dunlop have also uploaded a cool interview with Joe Perry check it out below!

Although this guitar was unveiled a while ago at MusikMesse 2010, the Ibanez JEM FP2 sees the floral pattern evolved from its original design with a very striking Japanese looking design. You can check out the full specs over at Ibanez.com.

DBZ Guitars by Dean Zelinsky have just updated their website now offering a fullscreen flash version called Experience, “eeek!” I hear you iPad users cry, yeah well complain to Steve Jobs not Dean! The site offers stunning massive hi-res photography of the DBZ Collection which have some of the craziest CNC programming you’ll see on a guitar, plus some very cool hardware too. The only bad UI problem I found (aside from the fact that it is flash dependant of course) is that when you open the latest news or contact info you have to click on the navigation button to close the overlay rather than having a close button within it!?

This site could easily have been created using html/css & javascript which wouldn’t alienate iPad users but aside from that this site is a great way to check out the DBZ Range.

DBZ Experience

I want to share an amazing invention that I daresay will soon become common-place in the guitar world, Dagmar Guitars has been working with Dr Hans-Peter Loock of Queen’s University in Canada developing a new type of pickup using Fiber Optics. I recently had an email conversation with Dr. Loock where he gave me this great explanation:

The sound of many acoustic instruments (mostly acoustic guitars) is frequently recorded using piezo-electric pickups. Piezos record the vibration of the soundboard of the guitar and convert the vibration amplitude into a voltage. Piezos work quite well, but - as I understand - have some disadvantages: they measure acceleration as well as amplitude and therefore cannot have a completely flat frequency response. They are sometimes susceptible to radio frequency noise (the 60 Hz hum) and it is difficult to use more than a few of these pickups on one instrument.

Instead of piezo electric pickups we use strain sensitive fiber optic cables. Our fibers have a strain sensor, called a “Fiber Bragg Grating” near their end, which reflects light of only one particular wavelength. When the grating is strained a different wavelength is reflected. The FBG is fixed to the guitar body and we send laser light at the “unstrained reflection wavelength” along the fiber and record the intensity of the reflected light. When the guitar body vibrates, the FBG is strained, laser light of the same wavelength is no longer reflected (but is transmitted) and the reflected light intensity is reduced. The photodetector can therefore monitor the amplitude of vibration. We feed its output directly into an audio amplifier for recording and reproduction.

The advantage is that this pickup is still the size and weight of a fiber optic cable (micrograms and dimensions of about 100 micrometers diameter and 2 mm length). In Pete’s [Pete Swanson - Dagmar Guitars] guitar seven pickups were embedded into the wood of the soundplate before varnishing and therefore become a part of the body.  Also the frequency response is flat up to 20 kHz and we have not observed any interference form electromagnetic fields (or room light!). We do have issues with laser intensity noise and with intensity noise form the fiber optic cables though. Our current research project (was funded only last week!) will focus on eliminating these last sources of noise to get as close as possible to the true sound of the instrument.

I realize this is a lot of optics, but in essence the technology is not that different from what is already used in the fiber-optic vibration monitoring of airplane wings, wind turbine blades, generators, buildings and bridges. We focus on musical instruments, but hope that eventually all other applications will also benefit from our research.

We have commissioned a guitar from Dagmar Guitars (luthier: Pete Swanson) that has 7 fiber optic pickups permanently built in. The guitar is called “Vicky” (pictured above).

This all sounds very exciting to me, totally eliminating external, and hopefully with their latest round of funding, internal noise from a pickup will mean a totally true representation of the guitar’s tone which will be very popular with Acoustic and Archtop jazz guitars.

For more info keep an eye on http://www.dagmarcustomguitars.com/ for more info.

Update: khas evets posted a comment asking about how you capture the sound of the string as well as the body with this pickup system. Dr Loock’s has responded to this comment with a little more info:

“The question is an interesting one: of course the fiber optic sensors - just like good piezos - record faithfully the vibration of the guitar body but not necessarily that of the strings. To get more of the sound of the strings one can put either pickup right at the bridge. In fact, Pete’s guitar has two fiber optic pickups on either side of the “floating” bridge, in addition to five more pickups at other places on the body. We also experimented with putting fiber optics on the headstock (works well for solid body guitars!), but decided against that for Pete’s guitar.”