I first heard about the Fender Kenny Wayne Shepherd Artist Series Stratocaster several months ago, but didn’t hear much about it from Fender. However, I noticed today that Fender has information about the guitar on their Web site.

The guitar is based on Kenny’s own ‘61 Fender Strat and features custom-voiced Kenny Wayne Shepherd pickups, an alder body, maple neck w/ rosewood fretboard, and 21 jumbo frets.

This guitar looks pretty nice and has a street price in the $700-$750 range. Guitar Center is reporting that models will be available in October.

As an interesting (to me) aside, Kenny Wayne Shepherd played a small role in my wife and I getting together. At the time, my wife and I had mutual friends and one night I mentioned that I was going to the KWS concert that was coming up. At the time, KWS was not all that well known, but my wife surprised me by knowing who he was and being interested in going to the show. Not only that, she was a fan of SRV, as well. She’s had my heart ever since!

Fender has recently introduced the Jim Adkins JA-90 Thinline Telecaster. Adkins is the guitarist and frontman for Jimmy Eat World. I’m not all that familiar with Jimmy Eat World, but this looks like a nice guitar! The guitar features P-90s, a semi-hollow Ash body, medium jumbo frets and comes in red or black.

(via Electric Guitar Review)

Editor’s note: Please indulge me in a quick off-topic post.

Last year, my wife Tiffany decided to make a career change. She decided to move out of IT and create her own company, where she creates handcrafted jewelry and purses. She has worked extremely hard over the past year developing a wide range of jewelry and purses. I’m very proud of her and all that she has accomplished in this past year. It’s very gratifying to hear the compliments she receives on the products she creates.

For most of this year, she’s been selling mostly through local events, but she has recently put up a large amount of inventory on her Web site. The holidays are coming up fast, and if you’re looking for a unique, handcrafted gift to give to family or friends, consider some handcrafted jewelry or a purse from my wife’s company, Evitt and Co. As a bonus and a thank you for visiting this site, you can use the promo code guitar lifestyle to receive 10% off all purchases!

Justin Ouellette, the founder of Muxtape, recently posted an update detailing his past dealings with record labels trying to keep Muxtape running, as well as the future of the site after receiving notice from the RIAA:

Over the next week I learned a little more, mainly that the RIAA moves quite autonomously from their label parents and that the understanding I had with them didn’t necessarily carry over. I also learned that none of the labels were especially interested in helping me out, and from their perspective it had no bearing on the negotiations. I disagreed. The deals were still weeks or months away (an eternity on the internet) meaning that at best, Muxtape was going to be down until the end of year.

It’s amazing to me that the RIAA would completely ignore the fact that the labels apparently wanted to work with Justin and Muxtape. Well, I guess it should be amazing to me, but unfortunately this seems to be business as usual for the RIAA. It is a little surprising that the labels don’t seem to have much say over what the RIAA. Who’s running who?

BluesJamTracks.com has recently completed a site refresh. Not only is the site visually refreshed, there’s a lot of new content added, as well. New jam tracks have been added, and Jan Cyrka’s “Hoodlum Corner” column has been added to the site.

Additionally (and most interesting to me), a special version of Guthrie Govan’s Erotic Cakes album is available for download. I’ve wanted to purchase a copy of Erotic Cakes since I first heard of Govan, but, until now, the album was only available here in the US as an import CD, which was expensive. Now that the album is available for download, it’s much more reasonably priced. Furthermore, the special edition available on BluesJamTracks contains bonus material, including a live version of ‘Fives’, a full transcription of ‘Fives’, a backing track of ‘Fives’ with no lead guitar, and PDFs of the booklet and inlay. Nice! Other albums have also been added to the site, including albums by Jan Cyrka and Keith More.

All in all, this is a nice site update for BluesJamTracks with some welcome additions. I bought a few backing tracks the other day, and these are very high quality tracks with transcriptions of the sample solos to help you get started.

(via Mark McGuigan)

Modern Guitars has recently posted an interview with John Petrucci. The interview covers several topics, such as John’s time at Berklee, Dream Theater’s “Greatest Hit”, and the possibility of another Petrucci solo album:

Brian: Will you be preparing another solo CD, in the vein of Suspended Animation?

John: Yes, I will! That’s something I had a lot of success and a lot of fun with. It enabled me to do the G3 tours also. Yeah, time for another one.

John goes on to further say the he’d be interested in doing another G3 tour:

Brian: Another G3 as well?

John: If it comes up. Joe [Satriani] is a good friend of mine. It’s his operation, so I’m always up for it if he offers. I’ve done six so far, everywhere from the US, South America, Australia, Asia. It’s a lot of fun.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Jason Bonham were in the studio jamming together and writing new material. It seems like politics may prevent a full reunion with Robert Plant from occurring, but MusicRadar is reporting that Plant may be interested in a potential reunion, there’s just a lot of paperwork to fill out:

Just for the O2 show, Plant says, “The endless paperwork was like nothing I’ve experienced before. I’ve kept every one of the emails that were exchanged before the concert and I’m thinking of compiling them for a book, which I feel sure would be hailed as a sort of literary version of Spinal Tap.”

Bojam is:

…an online music collaboration service connecting musicians to mix, record, and collaborate to produce original or popular music

Bojam recently presented at TechCrunch50, discussing their online music service. Not only is Bojam a music collaboration engine, it’s also a music mixer, and a wiki-style editing platform, where musicians can edit song info, lyrics, and instrument tabs. Additionally, Bojam is an online social network for musicians.

The songs made through Bojam can be sold on services like iTunes and Rhapsody, so musicians can potentially earn income from collaborating on the site. It’s not clear exactly how this will work, as each musician will own the rights to their music, so I wonder how this will work when multiple musicians from various locations contribute to a song. It seems like it could get a little hairy with payment/copyrights.

The Bojam service is currently in beta, but it’ll be interesting to see what becomes of the service as they move towards a more widespread release.

The Black Strat, the book about David Gilmour’s legendary black Stratocaster by Gilmour’s long-time guitar tech Phil Taylor, is being released by Hal Leonard on Monday, September 22. The book has been expanded and revised for this second edition.

The release of the book is to coincide with the release of Gilmour’s new 2CD/2DVD set, Live at Gdansk. Also, Fender will be releasing the David Gilmour Signature Stratocasters on Monday, so it’s a big day for Gilmour!

Unfortunately, I’m sure it’ll also be a bittersweet day for Gilmour, as Pink Floyd founder Richard Wright passed away this week. In an odd coincidence, my father-in-law has been in town for the past few weeks, and we’ve watched several Pink Floyd/Gilmour DVDs, where Wright is featured prominently.

For more information about The Black Strat, visit the official Web site for the book.

The Experience Hendrix Tour is gearing back up for some more shows, with this year’s tour happening from October 15 and November 7. Like years past, this year’s tour will include many great artists. This year’s lineup includes Eric Johnson, Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin, Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Brad Whitford, Doyle Bramhall II, Eric Gales, Mato Nanji, Chris Layton, as well as other special guest artists. With artists of that caliber, it’s bound to be a great show!