Signed Epiphone guitar auction

Great auction for fans of both Epiphone and Linkin Park, and for a great cause too.
Signed Epiphone guitar auction: “Linkin Park has donated an autographed Epiphone guitar to be auctioned off to help raise funds for Habitat for Humanity, one of Music for Relief’s partner organizations. Here’s your chance to become the [...]

New Epiphone guitar coming soon

Epiphone’s brand new blog has an exciting post about a new Epiphone guitar which is coming soon. “We’ve been hard at work around here on an awesome new model that we are REALLY excited about!” There are some pics on the blog. Hard to say what it is from those. But it’s electric, it’s got black pick-up covers and what looks like a silver pickguard. From the look of the fretboard inlays, it could be a signature model or some sort of special edition.

In other news, only four days to go until the Slash Les Paul Gold Top hits the shops. Woohoo! Get your credit card ready.

Epiphone Launches Slash Les Paul Goldtop

Epiphone has announced the introduction of its second Slash signature Les Paul, the Slash Les Paul Gold Top.

Like the Slash Les Paul Standard Plus Top, the Goldtop was designed and built in collaboration with the Guns n Roses and Velvet Revolver guitarist and is limited to only 2, 000 units worldwide.

Epiphone Dot

The Epiphone Dot is based on Gibson’s ES-335 hollow-bodied electric guitars which were first produced way back in 1958.

The Epiphone Dot has a laminated maple body, glued-on maple neck, a dot inlaid rosewood fretboard. The Alnico Humbuckers are controlled by volume and tone pots whose bonnet knobs are period accurate. There’s chrome hardware and a Tune-o-matic bridge with stopbar tailpiece. The f-holes and shaped pickguard complete the look.

Five great iPhone apps for guitar players

The whole world seems to be talking about the new iPhone 3G at the moment. And with good reason: I’ve had one for just over a week now and already I’m wondering how I managed without it.

One of the great features of the new iPhone software, which comes with the iPhone 3G and is available as a free uprgrade for older iPhones, is the ability to install third party applications.

Apple’s App Store is already brimming with fantastic applications. So what, you ask, has this to do with guitars, Kenny? Well, it so happens that quite a few of the new apps are music related and a number of those are aimed at guitar players.

Epiphone BB King Lucille

For as long as I’ve been able to play the guitar, BB King has been my favourite guitar player. There’s something about his style which manages to capture the joy and misery of the blues in one note. And the way he wrings the neck of his beloved Lucille to extract every last ounce of vibrato and sustain from it is sensational.
I’ve been lucky enough to see him live twice. On the first occasion, at the Edinburgh Playhouse in 1989, the theatre was absolutely jumping. Everyone was dancing by the end and there was a couple in front of us who looked they were having a particularly good time.

The five best guitar teachers on YouTube

YouTube is a fantastic resource for guitar lessons. Not only are there dozens of highly-skilled guitar players demonstrating chords, lick, styles and songs. But some of the world’s best, and most well-known guitar players, some of them sadly no longer with us, are right there giving lessons.

So I thought that it would be great to put together a kind of video notebook of some of the best lessons I could find on there and keep it so that when I get some time (ha!) I can watch the videos and learn a few new tricks.

Jimi Hendrix’s Epiphone

Danny has just posted a great piece on The Guitars of Jimi Hendrix, in which he describes how Hendrix played an Epiphone Wilshire . The Wilshire was a Strat-style guitar made between 159 and 1970 and which origianlly features two P-90 pick-ups and a Tune-o-matic bridge and stop tailpiece. In mid-192 the P_90s were replaced with mini-humbuckers.

The anatomy of an Epiphone guitar. Part 1: The Humbucker

The humbucker, or humbucking pick-up, is a feature of most of the electric guitars made by Epiphone and its parent company, Gibson.

The humbucker is a two-coil pick-up with coils of reversed polarity, reverse wound, and connected in series. The name is derived from the fact the design of the pick-up significantly reduces the noise and interference associated with single coil pick-ups used in other guitars, such as Fender’s Stratocaster. In other words, they ‘buck the hum.’

Epiphone Riviera

The Epiphone Riviera is a hollow-body electric guitar, based closely on the Gibson E335 and originally manufactured between 1962 and 1969. It has a maple side and top, one-piece set mahogany neck, and a rosewood fretboard with trapezoidal pearl inlays.