Guitar Info

The seller of this home-made ZZ Top car guitar is asking a staggering 500 Euros for it! (That's £396 or $708).

As if that wasn't bad enough, it's not even a functioning guitar! It's just a "decorative item".

(Interesting use of a Telecaster bridge, don't you think?)

Here's something that I've been playing about with over this last week. Now I've seen these "guitars" before and had always written them off as being toy-like. However, having read a few reviews and followed some discussions on forums, I decided that I'd like to try one out. Although it was designed as a basic learning instrument (the idea being that the learner can play along to songs with a backing track whilst being guided by chord shapes that light up on the "fretboard"), the fact that it is MIDI-equipped makes it really quite interesting.

I found a seller from Japan on eBay who seemed to be shifting a fair few of these, and the price wasn't too prohibitive, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. Last Monday I arrived home to find that it had been delivered - and all without having to pay the expected custom charges (although perhaps I should keep quiet about that).

Getting it out of the box my first impression was of how toy-like it looked. The wooden body is a nice touch, but much of the rest of it is plasticky and flimsy-looking. The wooden portion of the body is only a thin slice sandwiched between two layers of plastic housing parts for the electronics. I mean, look at the back of this instrument, it's hardly neat is it? It would have been so much nicer if all the electronics could have been housed inside a wooden body. It needn't cost that much to produce. Bear in mind that Yamaha also produce the cheap and cheerful (and excellent value-for-money) Pacifica 112 guitars which have solid wood bodies.

The plastic neck also is very insubstantial. When playing the "guitar", I was aware that I was bending the neck when playing certain chords. Again I wonder if the back of the neck couldn't have been made from wood.

Another gripe is that on my model the tremolo arm seems to be totally knackered. Unfortunately this guitar was sold as seen, and even if it wasn't any return postage to Japan would make this a much more expensive experiment.

On plugging in and turning it on I soon found out that the internal speaker beneath the "strings" on the body is absolutely rubbish. Every sound I tried selecting was distorted and quite unlistenable. Oh dear, so far NOT so good.

Next I plugged in headphones. Now, that's better!

Now this "guitar" doesn't actually have any strings as such. It has buttons for each of the fret positions on six strings up to the twelth fret, and for the right hand it has six plastic bars which can be picked, plucked or strummed. I was surprised at how quickly I was able to find my way around using this system. In its favour, it does feel like you are playing a real stringed guitar. The fretboard buttons are shaped as if they are small sections of string, and the right hand "strings" are actually quite responsive. Keying the left-hand string-buttons will start up the relevant note(s) but quietly as if hammering on with the left hand on a real guitar. You need to strike the right hand "strings" to get any real attack to a note.

Obviously with the string-buttons you can't perform string bends so no chance of any expression there, but you are allowed quite a lot of expression with the right hand as those bars seem very responsive. They are certainly responsive in terms of volume, in how hard or softly you play the strings.

I suppose the other way of injecting a bit of expression would be through use of the whammy bar, but that's a no-no on this particular example.

There are twenty on-board sounds. A classical guitar, steel-strung guitar, twelve string, several basses, banjo, etc. Some sounds are better than others (the banjo's quite good), and the bass sounds are better when you drop the whole instrument down an octave using the tuning function. The 12-string sound raised an octave gives quite a nice mandolin sound.

Did I mention that the string-buttons on the "fretboard" light up as you play them?. Although this was conceived as a learning aid and might seem a little cheesy, it's still quite useful because it highlights where you are playing sloppy chords, perhaps where one finger is straying slightly onto a string where it shouldn't, which I'm sure I do quite a lot. So, it discourages sloppy playing, which is surely a good thing.

So things are getting more interesting, but it's still limited in what it can do.

Next I dug out my old Yamaha QY-20 sequencer and connected the guitar with MIDI cables. Now the cables were quite short at only two metres so I made a mental note not to go walkabout while playing. (I doubt I'd ever want to play this in a performance, so no worries about running about the stage and not having a long enoguh MIDI cable).

I used to use the QY20 quite a few years ago when recording songs. I'd spend ages programming it, but rarely entered any tracks in real time as I'm not too familiar with a keyboard layout and also the keyboard on this thing is tiny and made of rubber. How great would it be to be able to use a controller laid out like a guitar fretboard, something that I'm familiar with.

The guitar hadn't come with a manual so there ensued a session of trial and error trying to get the guitar to communicate with the QY-20. For ages it seemed that nothing was working, then I realised that I had a synth sound from the QY-20 on the high E-string.

With just one string working I tried out a few QY-20 sounds. Some worked better than others. Not everything sounds great with the kind of attack you get from plucked strings. I particularly liked some of the more tuned percussion sounds such as vibes and xylophone.

It took me a while to work out how to get all the other strings working. The QY-20 is an 8-track sequencer. What the MIDI was doing was assigning one "string" of the guitar to each of the first six channels of the QY-20. I found it somewhat tedious having to dial in the same sound to each of the six channels just to try out a synth sound across the whole guitar, but I soon realised that this system had its advantages too. For example, I could assign different synth sounds to different strings. This sounded quite interesting with sax sounds where I could put a baritone sax sound on the low E and A, tenor sax on D and G, and alto sax on B and high E.

Another trick was that I was able to pan each string to a different position in the stereo spectrum. Neat!

Now I was beginning to get ideas... But, these are going to have to wait for now as I want to experiment some more. I think the real test will be to record a song using this instrument.

Stay tuned...

This skeletal looking Born To Rock bass is an odd one. The body is made of aluminium tubing, whilst the neck is wood but fronted with an aluminium fretboard. This was made circa 1995 and I'm guessing it's quite rare as you don't see these too often. Actually, I've never seen one before. I wonder if it was a production instrument or just a one-off? It does have a home-made quality to it. The bar connecting the end of the neck to the body puts me in mind of Roland's 707 synth controller. Apparently the idea is to eliminate deadspots.

UPDATE: BigRedX has pointed me in the direction of borntorock.com. One of the most interesting features of these guitars and basses is unique system they use to replace the traditionally used trussrod. To quote the website, "Suspending the neck on pivots allows the strings to position the neck. A string under tension defines a straight line. Since the strings are straight, so is the neck."

It's interesting to note that in the Care and Maintenance section the following method of string changing is recommended: "Lay the guitar flat on a table. Remove the strings and clean the neck with a paper towel. Don't use abrasive cleaners. Make sure not to pull on the neck when the strings are off, because it is attached only by the pickup wires. Restring in the following order, for greatest convenience: 6,1,5,2,4,3."

This cheesy old Japanese guitar bearing the Bruno brand name was possibly supposed to have a hollow-bodied Mosrite vibe, but to me it looks like a Gibson 335 has been given the Brian Eastwood Distortocaster treatment.

Speaking of which, Guitarz reader Johnny was the eventual buyer of the Distortocaster that we featured recently, and you might be glad to hear that he's removed the dolphin!

When I first looked at Woody B's Internal Combustion Guitar website I couldn't quite figure out what I was looking at. Was it absolute genius or completely bonkers?

Viewing the videos the picture does become clearer, but I don't think these convey the full potential of this instrument. It seems the concept behind the guitar is to recreate the effect of playing in front of a bank of Marshall amps and finding that "sweet spot" where your guitar resonates with the power of the amps and enables you to execute some blistering guitar playing - BUT - without the extreme volume and need for a bank of Marshalls.

As Woody B, who would seem to be the creator of this beast, says: "It's the guitar you don’t just play... you actually feel the ride!"

From what I can work out what happens is that the guitar has a "driver pickup" mounted near the bridge. The signal from this is fed out to a small low-wattage amp, and then back into the guitar which has its own resonance chamber and speaker. This has the effect of bringing the guitar to life with its own resonance and sustain which can then be tuned with a pot to the rear of the bridge. The neck pickup - one of Lace's very tasty alumitone units - then captures the sound of the whole and sends it through to your main amp. Or alternatively, you can use the hex pickup on the midi-capable V12 model to send to synth equipment.

It's a very intriguing instrument, and puts me in mind of the new Moog guitar with its various sustain modes.

One feature it does have in common with the Moog guitar is a particularly hefty price tag. If I had the necessary money I think I'd be hard pushed which to buy: the Moog or the Internal Combusion Guitar. I certainly prefer the Internal Combusion Guitar when it comes to aesthetics and part of me suspects that it may have more "mojo" (if I'm allowed to use that word!).

In summary: very interesting. I'd like to see and hear more.

UPDATE: Read the Comments for more on this guitar from Woody B himself.

We've all seen that tired old cliché that is the toilet seat guitar (time and time again, yawn...), but as a variation on the theme this four-stringer is a bedpan guitar.

I'm not quite sure what the deal is with the fake bullet holes.

This T.F. Elliot White Dove guitar, handcrafted in the USA circa 2000, is somewhat reminiscent of the now legendary Mosrite brand of guitars. Apparently Mr Ed Elliot worked with Semie Moseley in the 70s and 80s and now owns the original Mosrite luthiers shop equipment, and this Dove guitar - number 7 of only 7 - has been built in the style of Mosrite in homage to the originals. Check the headstock shape, the zero fret, the slanted front pickup and diagonally-ended fretboard...