ESP - New Products for 2006
ESP Guitars is introducing 16 new signature series guitars at this years NAMM Show. Included are the Dan Jacobs (Atreyu) model, the Travis Miguel (Atreyu) model, the Alexi Laiho (Children of Bodom) model, the George Lynch model, the Jeff Hanneman (Slayer) model, the Michael Wilton (Queensryche) model, the Micheal Ammot (Arch Enemy) model, the Page Hamilton (Helmet) model, the Richard Z (Rammstein) model, and the Stephen Carpenter (Deftones) model. ESP is also introducing 6 new Standard LTD models.
Gibson - New Products for 2006
Gibson USA is announcing 15 new electric guitars this weekend at the NAMM Show. Included are the SG Goddess model, the Les Paul Vixen, which are targeted towards female guitarists, the SG GT, the USA New Century Series, the Vegas High Roller, and the Les Paul Studio Premium Plus. Gibson also introduced 6 new acoustic guitars at NAMM. Included are the SJ-300, the Songwriter Deluxe-12, the Traveling Songwriter, the CJ-165, and the SJ-150.
Fender - New Products for 2006
Fender has announced several new guitars for this year. Since 2006 will be their 60th anniversary, they are releasing 60th anniversary Stratocasters and Telecasters. Also new is a Deluxe Power Stratocaster, a Koa Stratocaster and a Koa Telecaster. You can browse the full list of new products here.
NAMM
Yesterday, the NAMM Show began at the Anaheim Convention Center. There are always a lot of new product announcements by guitar manufacturers at the NAMM Show, since it is targeted towards music retailers. If you’re interested in hearing about the new products that are announced, I’ll be keeping an eye on the news announcements over the weekend, and I will try to report as much of it as I can.
Jake Shimabukuro
While Jake Shimabukuro is not a guitar player (he plays the ukulele), he’s a virtuoso of his chosen instrument and I think he might be of interest to guitar players. If you’ve never heard of Jake, then you’ll be amazed at the sounds that he can get from the ukulele. Jake is from Hawaii, and much of his music bears that influence; however, his music also has a jazzy feel to it. Jake has been playing and recording for years, but has recently received rave reviews in the press. For example, Frets magazine recently declared him the “Jimi Hendrix of the ukulele.” Jimmy Buffett reportedly liked him so much that after hearing him play, he invited him on tour with him. Jake has also recorded with Bela Fleck. Shimabukuro has released several albums over the past few years, the most recent of which is Dragon.
UPDATE: Bill mentioned in the comments that there was a video on Google Video of Jake playing While My Guitar Gently Weeps. I found it, and here’s a link to the video.
Classical Guitar Calendar
If you’re a fan of the classical guitar, then you might want to check out the calendar put out this year by the Baltimore Classical Guitar Society. The calendar features 12 different caricatures of famous classical guitarists, including Andres Segovia, David Russell, and the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. The calendar comes in a CD case, which can be used to display the calendar. The calendar is about $15 directly from the Baltimore Classical Guitar Society Web site.
Zappa Plays Zappa
I just noticed that Steve Vai will be touring this Summer with Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa on the Zappa Plays Zappa tour in Europe, where the Zappa brothers will be playing the music of their father, Frank Zappa. The tour is the first official tour of Frank Zappa music since he last performed the music in 1993.
Online Music Radio
I’m always looking for new music to listen to. Occasionally, I’ll stumble across a new artist’s site or a friend will mention a new artist, but if the artist does not have any music on their Web site or are fairly obscure, then I still won’t be able to actually hear the music. Thanks to my friend David, I signed up for Yahoo’s Music service, which provides over a million songs for $4.99/month, which is a pretty good deal and provides a lot of music. However, it’s not all that easy to discover new music using the Yahoo Music Engine. Enter Pandora and Live365.
Pandora is an outgrowth of the Music Genome Project, which has taken on the massive task of reviewing and categorizing music and comparing musical qualities of each artist to help end-users discover music that is similar to artists they like. Pandora offers a free service and a subscription service; the free service includes ads while the subscription service doesn’t. Basically, you tell Pandora the artists/musical styles that you like, and the Pandora service will stream music that is similar to your tastes. I’ve tried Pandora and have had fairly good results. Pandora does a good job of playing music similar stylistically to what you specify, and you can create stations that match your personal tastes. I found that Pandora will play a lot of music that I’d never heard of before that is similar to artists I like, which is what I was looking for. Also, if a song plays that you don’t like, it’s easy to tell the service not to play that song again using the “Rules of Thumbs” system. If you don’t like a song, you simply click the Thumbs Down button to tell the service you don’t like the song, which will stop the song and let you skip to another song.
Live365 was is an Internet radio service that was recently recommended to me by a coworker, and I have to say that after a few days of using the service I’m fairly impressed. Live365 provides a huge range of radio stations to choose from. For example, I found a high-quality station called Guitar Central that I really like. This station plays only instrumental guitar music all day long. I’ve already discovered several artists that I’ve never heard of before and that I plan on looking into further. However, unlike Pandora, which lets you skip songs, if a song happens to pop up that you don’t like, you are not able to skip to another song using Live365. This is only a minor downside, though, because the vast majority of music that I’ve heard on Live365 has been good. One advantage of paying for a Live365 VIP subscription is the radio client that they provide free with the subscription.
Both Pandora and Live365 offer free and paid services. The paid subscriptions range from $3-5/month, which is basically the cost of one Grande Cafe Mocha from Starbucks. Either service seems to be well worth the money if you don’t want to hear the ads, but I’d recommend Live365 just slightly more than Pandora based on the number of stations offered.
Do you have GAS?
I recently started reading the book Clapton’s Guitar
Cream To Receive Lifetime Achievement Award
Eric Clapton and his bandmates in Cream, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce are some of the recipients of this year’s Lifetime Achievement Awards given out by The Recording Academy for their work in Cream. Eric Clapton has also been nominated for two Grammy Awards, one in the category of Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance and one in the category of Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.
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About
Welcome to my guitar blog! My name is Josh, and this site is my attempt to celebrate the guitar, its history, and its players. Read more...
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