Cool Guitar

I always love to see reeeeally cool guitars...and this one is wild! Man, that's some incredible woodwork! This guitar was handcrafted at Ed Roman Guitars in Las Vegas for Swedish born shredder superstar Yngwie Malmsteen.

It has recently come to light that this unbelievable one of a kind piece of art was handmade as a tribute and present for Yngwie Malmsteen!
This guitar was displayed at the NAMM show a few years ago, Ed saw it there, and having a penchant for odd guitars took photos of it at that time. There the story of this unique instrument takes an odd twist. The guitar was then sent to Miami for Yngwie, but It was never claimed. Because it was not claimed (for whatever strange reason, possibly he was on tour), it was impounded and then bought at a very dear price at auction.
The new owner contacted Ed a couple of years ago to sell the guitar. He described the guitar to Ed. When Ed told him he had a picture of it on the website already he was quite surprised and immediately knew that Ed would be the right person to sell this fine one of a kind collectors dream instrument !

via

ps - anyone else got a cool guitar pic on the net somewhere send the linx - would be cool to check out.

Gibson's Guitar Hero

Ha - was wondering when the guitar business world would latch on - just picked up the morning guitar e-news and found this via:

Sunnyvale, Calif., August 30, 2005 – RedOctane®, a leading creator of music video games and peripherals, has announced an exclusive deal with musical giant Gibson Guitar where several famous Gibson models will be featured in the new game Guitar Hero™, the highly anticipated rock'en roll guitar video game coming in the fall of 2005 to the PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system.

"Gibson guitars are an essential American rock element revered by musical artists worldwide for their incredible style and amazing sound." said Kai Huang, CEO of RedOctane. "This is the first time a guitar manufacturer has been exclusively featured in a video game, and we're excited to be working with such an iconic company."
"Gibson Guitar is the perfect partner for this high energy game from RedOctane," said Henry Juszkiewicz, Chairman and CEO Gibson Guitar. "Gibson is every Guitar Hero's instrument of choice and now they can have it in a rock-n-roll simulation game too."
Guitar Hero, developed by veteran music video game creator Harmonix®, combines the best of rhythm game action with classic American music. The game puts you at center stage of your very own rock band, featuring unique characters, a selection of Gibson electric guitars to play and concert venues that grow in size as your music career progress. The title includes over 30 licensed rock songs including tracks originally made famous by such artists as Ozzy Osbourne, David Bowie, Boston, Sum 41, Audioslave, White Zombie, Franz Ferdinand, and The Ramones.

"Seeing Gibson guitars in the game adds a sense of realism to Guitar Hero, that we feel will really appeal to rock fans." said John Tam, game producer of Guitar Hero. "The game is going to feature a number of legendary Gibson guitars, and players will be able to choose from a number of different paint schemes for each."
The game has been met with rave reviews in the gaming community, winning "Best of Show 2005h at the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) and was one of twenty-five games invited to demonstrate at "G-Phoria" – G4 videogame TV's annual award show in Los Angeles.

Check out the video trailer - lol.

Lonestar.... a beatiful thing!

Well, I've been gettin' real serious about amplifier hunting these days - need to get a good amp to record and gig with - been borrowing waaaaay too many amps over the past 5 years (thanx to all you who've helped me out with the loners). Anyway, went down to Long & Mquade's with Matt to trial a few amps and man, we spent from about 1:00pm - 4:00pm pushing some great amps to the limit to see what kind of tones we could get out. We auditioned mostly mesa...like all day - with the exception of the Peavey JSX 212 combo amp just to see what the hype is all about - conclusion: great amp if you're into shredding ...like... alot. Anyway, of the mainstream brands we really prefer mesa anyway - like totally.
I've been puting lots of thought into the fact that huge amp stacks put out way too much wattage for my liking - i doubt i'd ever turn the master above 1 or 2. I wanted to see if I could really get an amp to sound great on its clean and dirty channels while pushing it to its middle range pot settings - maybe take a 30 - 50 watt amp and push it and see what i can do instead of going huge triple rectifier head and only using 1/16 of its capabilities - u get the picture. btw: whoever is making reverbs at the factory to put into these amps: stop making them suck! Sheesh. To this day I have yet to find an amp that's got a "great" reverb sound. If anyone out there could convince me pleeeease let me know.

Well, after going thru the mesa F50 for a while we slipped over to the Lonestar 1x12 and 2x12 combos for a while. My PRS sounded unreal thru the Lonestar 1x12 combo - like amazing! Nice clean tone from the single coils and good chunk on the drive channel thru bridge. We were playing these amps for like an hour or so when shop Mesa guru Don says that mesa puts out the exact same technology as the combo but in a head/cab model. We thought hey, why not just check it out. Well... WOW... like WOW! It was the same brains inside the head but took the tone like 100% thru the roof! We must have played the thing for like a good hour - cranked it loud..i mean loud. Guys at the front desk came up to us with a smirk and asked if we could just one it down a touch - they couldn't even hear their telephone ring in the store..lol. Er..umm...sorry (whatever)...this amp was unreal. Some real earcandy to chew on. And yeah, to boot it had a not-sooo-bad reverb on it. I think my ear drums were creating their own reverb effect after cranking it that loud for so long..lol. Real impressive combination. Nice thing about this head was the 30->15->5W selection settings - switch it to create some drastic tonal changes! Really amazing sound - very "matchless" without spending the big$$. Matt and I are both looking to pick up a Lonstar Special Short head/2x12 OB cab after the quest. Man, if you haven't yet, check out the Lonestar.... a mesa amp that's a bit more than a mesa...

• Check out the official specs of MesaBoogie Lonestar Special here.

• Harmony Central Review for the Mesa Boogie Lonestar Special head/cab here.

• Just for fun, click here.
  

McPherson

So when my buddy Michael Olson was in town a while back I was able to check out his McPherson acoustic. I was like, 'yeah yeah so what's with the dumb hole location, right?' Well, read on. He was going on about his Taylor acoustic and how he thought it was superb (as it is and always shall be...) but was overwhelmed with the tone and action of the emerging fabulous McPherson's guitars (one's he tours with). Well, I got a chance to test drive his McPherson a little: yup - it's hands down one of the best acoustic guitars out there right now. For all you high-end "Taylor-made" acoustic guitar tone lovers, you gotta check out a McPherson, period.

bgv session

Here's a pic of the vocal crew just after our final bgv session of this project - a great day of recording. From left to right: Kathy, myself, Skip, and Richard. We got thru two songs in about 6 hours of recording. Not bad considering we laid about 100 vocal trax on those two songs alone. This wraps up most of the vocal work on this particular segment of our cd project. Final mixdowns and mastering should be completed sometime in December. Good news too: Mercy Train is on deck to record an additional 10-12 songs starting in January - we're totally excited about the new material and can't wait to get started. We are looking to realease these first six songs as a "sampler" cd and record the next batch of tunes to form our debut album - very exciting times for us.