As part of it’s celebrations for it’s 40th Anniversary, Orange amps have now completely re-launched their website. Just as you would expect judging by the name and the product there is plenty of orange splashed around too! There is nothing completely revolutionary happening on the new site, but it easy enough to navigate your way to the meat of the site and check out Orange’s product range. Have a look at their 40th Anniversary Custom Shop for instance, each country will only see 1 or 2 of the 40 hand built 50 Watt collectors items, each with its own unique circuit and name, Point to Point hand Wiring, Plexi Glass front panel and powered by 2 x EL34 and 2 x ECC83/12AX7.

The Artists section is like a rock ‘n roll history chart with everyone from Aerosmith, AC/DC, Black Sabbath to Freddie King, Johnny WInter, Oasis, Prince and ZZ Top! But that will come as no surprise to anyone, Orange have long been known as one of the great tube amp manufacturers. There is also a History section which outlines some of the key points in Orange’s colourful (haha get it!) 40 years, and of course the obligatory Forum for all you Orange lovers to chat to each other about how good your gear sounds.

Finally the part that I always find most interesting, Orange have collected a few features together like this one from Portishead’s Adrian Utley who talks about his AD30 and recording their new album ‘Third’. I have to say I haven’t ever put an Orange amp through its paces but I might have to pop round to Gallin’s today and check out the Tiny Terror!

After a recent discussion over at GuitarFlame.com about recording our playing I decided to turn to YouTube for some inspiration. Well it didn’t take long until I was gazing in awe at the mastery of Guthrie Govan playing over some backing tracks. As I was watching I had the sudden urge to play over the same backing track and so I visited a site I haven’t been to in a while BluesJamTracks.com.  I’ve wondered for a while whether I would ever find this site useful because in my head I think why pay for a backing track when I can create one myself. But in reality thats never going to happen, I simply don’t have the time or the energy so I promptly proceeded to download the Larry Carlton backing track from the Rock Blues section.

There are various styles from old chicago blues to 60’s blues to contemporary blues, they have bundle offers where you can download a load for a discounted price (£7.99) or individually for £0.99 which I think is a fair price, it costs less than a pint of your favourite lager (and considering I haven’t lived in England for 6 years I imagine it is a LOT less than a pint!). The purchasing process is all handled by PayPal so it is nice and secure if you already have a PayPal account takes less than a minute to start downloading your track. The track I chose came with another mp3 that has an example solo being played over it and a pdf of the tab for the solo which is a cool extra to have!

If you want to hear some examples of the quality of the backing tracks (they are very professional) check out the Contemporary Blues Bundle page where Guthrie Govan shows us how its done! Also check out The Blue Room where famous guitarists such as Steve Vai and Paul Gilbert have recorded their take on some of the backing tracks.

So its time to put my money where my mouth is. I thought I should record a solo over the Larry Carlton backing track with my best Greg Howe vibrato/glissando impression!

In case anyone has trouble with the mp3 player above I have also uploaded it to my Ultimate Guitar profile.

After featuring the spectacular Custom Carved Top Grosh guitar the other day on Guitar Noize I received an email from Grosh telling me that they had launched a new website, so here it is. The new makeover has a very simple and focussed layout with the guitars divided into 4 categories: Retro Classics, Electra Jet, Bolt-on Maple tops (that is the Hollow Bent Top Custom pictured above) and Set Necks. Each category has its own set of models, for instance there are 6 different Bolt-on models. Each guitar is made from the finest materials, the Bolt-On Maple series uses master grade old growth genuine mahogany and AAAAA figured maple tops to create firm lows and gutsy mids with harmonically rich and articulate highs. The Rero Classics use Master grade Alder or Swamp Ash bodies and the Set Necks are made from hand “Tap Tone” matched old growth tone woods with AAAAA flame and quilted Maple tops.

Also check out the factory section for some photographs of the workshop including photos of Don building some guitars and a few photos of where the factory is in Colorado, which is enough to make you very jealous!

The new Music Man site has been up for a while now but I never got round to posting about it for some reason. The new site is based on some great photography which not only shows each instrument in detail but also the building process, although in ‘The Process’ section the navigation is a little annoying as you have to keep scrolling down the page to select the next image, they could have incorporated these thumbs in a scrolling carousel component or similar which would have been a much greater experience, but that’s the web developer talking not the guitarist! The Media Gallery has a good selection of artists talking about their Music Man guitars, such as Steve Morse with his incredibly complicated pickup selectors and John Petrucci who also talks about how his signature model has evolved (he looks a bit Bill Bailey in the vide too).

The instruments section has nice big thumbnails of every Music Man guitar laid out for easy selection, John Petrucci has 5 signature models! Once you click on a model such as the Silhouette Special you get a nice full sized guitar photo and with 3 other detail shots to choose from on the right hand side. Below this you get a downloadable diagram and schematics package as well as the product specifications and colour selections which pops up a photo over the product specification text of a model that has that particular finish.

It is a very polished and great looking website, finally guitar manufacturers are starting to realise that you have to pay the same attention to websites that you do to catalogues, it makes the Ernie Ball look very outdated in comparison but maybe a redesign is on the horizon for this site too?

Yet another guitar manufacturer website design update this time from ESP. This update comes as a welcome upgrade since their last version which automatically blasted you with loud metal when you loaded the site, Children of Bodom among others which I don’t mind as long as I choose to listen to them but the volume should never be on by default so I’m glad this has been rectified. The new design has also included a large promotion area which fades between various current competitions, videos or new guitars. There is a section called ESP TV which I thought sounded promising but it is just a selection of the vast array of ESP’s endorsees promoting their signature models. I was hoping for a little more variation, maybe some behind the scenes videos from designers, luthiers or inside the ESP production facilities.

As with most guitar sites (maybe all?) the news section seems to be void of an RSS feed so you’ll have to sign up for their newsletter to hear about updates. There is now (don’t think it was there before?) a contests section, and if you are a US Citizen you can currently enter a competition to win an Alex Laiho LTD AL-600 (note they aren’t giving away the ESP version!).

All in all its not a bad site from ESP, the guitars are easy to find and the pics are nice and big and you can select the various colour options to see how they look. There is nothing groundbreaking happening but maybe guitarists really don’t care about all the frills?

Only days after reporting about Ibanez’s new US and indeed global site design updates Gibson USA come along and show them how it is done (although they still insist on using spaces in their urls and thus having the ugly %20 in its place!). Gibson already had a very nice looking and usable site, so they have built on this with a bit of realignment rather than reinventing the wheel, a philosophy that no doubt has been taken from their Guitar building methodologies. The new products section is now nice divided on the splash page using bold navigation elements to the 4 main areas, ‘Les Paul’, ‘SG’, ‘Designer’ and ‘Bass’.

Once you make a selection you are taken to the all new product interface which has been thoughtfully developed using flash to enhance the user experience. For instance if you were to navigate to the Les Paul Supreme product page pictured above you have a simple screenshot navigation element in the top right corner where you can either use the arrows to see each photo or hover over the ‘thumbnails’ button which slides all the available thumbnails into view so you can select them individually, a nice touch. This is in the gallery view which is the default, you can then select features for details on finishes, hardware and woods or Media where users are encouraged to upload their own videos with their instrument to youtube, another bit of forward thinking by Gibson. I like the fact that Gibson are combining the power of YouTube to create user endorsements, I don’t think any other manufacturers are doing this yet.

Another addition to the product pages are the social links under each product, StumbleUpon, Facebook etc. I don’t really understand why Gibson need these being such a leader in Guitar manufacturing. Fair enough for blogs such as this where you are building a reader base but Gibson? Maybe these links would have been better placed in their Lifestyle section? That aside though Gibson have proven yet again that they are probably the guitar manufacturer that understands utilising the internet the most.

More Ibanez news for you!! Ok this is the last for a while I promise…

Ibanez have finally updated their US Website with the new 2008 models and in doing so launched a complete redesign! And very nice it is too!

Included in the new models are the Herman Li EGEN18 shredmachine for those who like to leave the odour of burning fingertip flesh in the air. Also there is the new SV Prestige SV5470A which had me drooling a little, but I’m ok now. There’s lots of ajaxy stuff going on for the nerds out there and a slightly disfunctional lightbox effect for the enlarged product shots, but maybe that is just on a Mac (no excuse really!). 

I’m not sure how long this site has been up but Parkwood Guitars now have a seperate microsite for the Parkwood Hybrid guitar. Apart from the Greg Howe video clip demonstrating the guitar they also have the tech specs and a model I’ve never seen, the PWH2 (pictured left) which looks fantastic in gloss black. The difference between the PWH2 and PWH4 is that the PWH2 has a solid maple top whereas the PWH4 has Australian Blackwood. Also the PWH4 has Seymour Duncan pickups fitted.

I haven’t seen any news about this but Fender have just launched a new design of their website which seems to be a lot more community focussed and uses one of my personal fave tricks the lightbox overlay when you click to enlarge a guitar, try it yourself click on the enlarge image button under the guitar picture on this page. Very nice.

I only wish they would update the Australian site it looks like it was designed by a 12 year old in 1994!