| Gibson rocking as pricey American icon in guitar-loving Japan
A visitor to the Tokyo Guitar Show tries out a classic Gibson as staff help tune an amplifier at a local Gibson shop's booth in Tokyo on Saturday, June 24, 2006. Gibson makes a range of guitars solely for the Japanese market, including rocker Tak Matsumoto's signature Les Paul in special guitar shades like canary yellow and sunburst. Although Gibson is making marketing pushes elsewhere where demand is expected to grow, such as China, Japan is still Gibson's biggest market outside the United States and twice as large as its biggest European market, Great Britain. (AP) .
Luthier's Many Labors Of Love: Creator of SoloEtte travel guitars ...
The guitars designed and built by Rossco Wright were once truly unique: a single stick of solid wood, with tuning pegs on the bottom, and a removable framework so the instrument could be broken down for easy transport. The SoloEtte classical guitar was designed as a travel guitar, and travel it did: To space, where one was presented to Russian cosmonauts on the space station Mir in 1995. And to Seattle, where a SoloEtte is encased in the Guitar Gallery at the Experience Music Project next to other ground-breaking guitars. It was a tiny niche in the highly competitive guitar industry, but a profitable one for Wright. At its peak around 2000, Wright Guitar Technology employed about 10 workers who built 100 SoloEtte guitars a month at the company's workshop in a west Eugene industrial park.
Multitrack Minds
Musicians who want to record at home have more options than ever before. If setting up a complicated computer-based studio doesn't sound like your idea of fun, check out a self-contained digital multi track. Today's units are more capable than ever; here we help you identify the features most important for capturing acoustic guitar. .
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