Tag Archives: electric guitar

Harley Benton Introduces DIY Kits To Personalize Your Guitars

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In the realm of musical craftsmanship, Harley Benton has raised the bar with its recent unveiling of a captivating range of do-it-yourself guitar kits. This innovative lineup not only offers musicians the opportunity to assemble their own instruments but also encourages a unique and personalized approach to guitar building. The collection includes four distinct models, each designed to cater to the diverse preferences and styles of guitarists. Among them, the standout is the unconventional square guitar, accompanied by a thin-line T-style model and left-handed S- and T-style models.

Designer: Harley Benton

Guitars are not just instruments; they are extensions of a musician’s identity and style. Recognizing this, Harley Benton’s DIY guitar kits acknowledge the personal connection individuals have with their instruments. These kits provide a canvas for musicians to express themselves not just through their playing but also through the process of building a guitar tailored to their preferences.

Each DIY kit is meticulously curated to include all the essential components required to build a complete instrument. From strings to pickups, body, and more, these kits are designed to offer a seamless and satisfying building experience. The standard Rengas body, with variations in wood color, is accompanied by maple necks, providing a sturdy foundation for creativity. Musicians can choose to paint the body or leave it in its natural state, with the added convenience of pre-prepared routing for pickups, tuners, bridge, and electronics.

Harley Benton recognizes that true creativity lies in customization. The kits come with bodies and necks finished with a wood sealer, facilitating easy application of lacquer for those who wish to add a personal touch to the aesthetics. The square model, for instance, comes with 22 frets, one volume and one tone control, a three-way switch, a Tune-O-Matic bridge, and two humbuckers, offering versatility and the potential for musicians to craft their unique sound.

There’s a special connection that comes with creating something with your own hands. Building a guitar from scratch provides not only a sense of accomplishment but also a deeper understanding and appreciation for the instrument. When musicians invest time and effort into crafting their guitars, they naturally develop a stronger bond with their creations. This hands-on experience allows them to see every inch of their instrument, fostering a sense of pride and ownership.

As someone who has owned a guitar since the age of 15, I understand the evolving relationship one has with their instrument. The idea of having a DIY guitar resonates deeply with me. I believe that if I had embarked on the journey of building my own guitar, I would have treasured it even more. The process of creating something from scratch adds a layer of intimacy that goes beyond the joy of playing; it becomes a testament to one’s creativity and craftsmanship. However, it may also leave room for some errors.

While the kits provide a solid foundation, it is the individual touch and craftsmanship that will make each guitar truly one-of-a-kind. Whether it’s the choice of color, the style of finish, or the selection of pickups, the creative journey of building a DIY guitar allows players to develop a deeper connection with their instrument. Each scratch, mark, and detail tells a story, making the guitar a unique reflection of the musician behind it.

Harley Benton’s DIY guitar kits are more than just a collection of components; they are a gateway to a world of musical creativity and self-expression. By providing musicians with the tools and guidance to build their own instruments, Harley Benton encourages a hands-on approach to music that goes beyond playing notes on a fretboard. These kits represent a bridge between the technical and artistic aspects of music, allowing musicians to shape not only their sound but also the physical embodiment of their musical journey.

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This ‘Infinity Mirror Guitar’ Might Be the Coolest Electric Guitar Ever Made

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We’ve seen plenty of cool-looking electric guitars in our time, but none of them captivate as much as this one. Designed by YouTuber and custom guitar builder Burls Art, this Infinity Mirror Guitar has you literally staring into its wonderful void of endless LEDs. Oh, and it sounds pretty funky too, with a delicious reverb that creates the same endless echo to match the guitar’s never-ending optical illusion!

Designer: Burls Art

Custom guitars are one of Burls Art’s areas of expertise, having experimented with designing guitars using everything from LEGO bricks to coffee beans. While his previous experiments have involved encasing objects in resin, this infinity mirror version is a different beast altogether, considering it’s hollow on the inside. That may present its own set of challenges, but nothing’s too big for the USA-based YouTuber, who’s built over 30 guitars on his channel alone.

The infinity mirror is a pretty clever optical illusion that uses two parallel reflective surfaces, with one of them being a two-way mirror. Sandwich a strip of LEDs between them and you have a seemingly endless loop of reflections that gives you the impression of a never-ending void. While most infinity mirrors are either square or circular, Burls Art’s guitar-shaped mirror has a distinctly different charm, with its guitar body shape.

The guitar is shaped somewhat like a double-cut Les Paul, and comes equipped with a humbucking pickup and a simple control panel at the bottom. Burls Art does point out that the LEDs, while they look great, create a bit of electrical feedback that causes a slight humming sound. Insulating tape could have potentially fixed the problem, but the guitar was already assembled at the time. There was also a concern of the guitar being potentially too fragile, but the thick acrylic plate on the front was sturdy enough to make the guitar structurally sound.

Solid wood was used for the guitar’s frame, with wood on the back and acrylic on the front.

The entire guitar, including the back of the fretboard and headstock, comes with a metallic paint job, adding to the steampunk appeal.

A two-way reflective vinyl was applied to the acrylic panel on the front.

The end result is stunning to look at, and even more to actually play with. Burls Art does take his guitar for a spin at the 8:10 minute mark in the video above. Although the guitar isn’t for sale, there are a few popular builds available on the Burls Arts website, including some made entirely from color pencils!

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This Minimalist Electric Guitar runs on its own Processor Chip and can Play Directly In Your Headphones

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Travel Guitars have existed for a while, but Natasha finally brings them to the mainstream with its Smart Guitar.

The concept of a Travel Guitar or a Silent Guitar is fairly clever. Acoustic guitars rely on resonance to play music, and electric guitars rely on amplifiers to power them… so what do you do when you just want to quietly play to yourself without disturbing people around you? A travel guitar was designed for just this purpose, allowing you to pretty much play just for yourself by plugging a pair of headphones in. The guitar is also characterized by a relatively hollow design, allowing you to travel easily with it. The Natasha Smart Travel Guitar, however, comes with a few extra tricks up its sleeve including effect and mode presets, and connectivity with smartphones (with a dedicated app for effects, recording, looping, etc.), all wrapped into a gorgeous all-black design made from bamboo wood, along with a solar system-inspired fretboard that has these adorable planetary motifs painted on the marked frets.

Designer: Natasha

Click Here to Buy Now: $497 $800 (38% Off) Hurry! Less than 3 Days left!

The guitar’s travel-friendly design is perhaps its biggest highlight. Borrowing from the unique style of Yamaha’s Silent Guitars, the Natasha Bamboo Smart Travel Guitar (it’s a bit of a mouthful) is a sleek little beast, and comes with a pretty linear design, from body to headstock. All the electronics and the battery are fitted into the main body of the guitar, while the strings continue down the fretboard to the headstock where the tuning keys are located. However, this doesn’t make for the most ergonomic setup, which is why the guitar comes with two curved wood elements that plug into the top and bottom, giving it a traditional guitar silhouette and a more ergonomic feel. They plug in during playtime, but unplug when you need to travel with your guitar, helping save a fair amount of space.

The Starry Sky edition of the guitar sports planets on the fretboard

The Natasha Smart Travel Guitar opens up when you want to travel with it

Spiritually, the guitar is closer to an electric guitar than an acoustic one. It works off a 2000mAh battery that powers the internal processor that gets the guitar running, and while electric guitars don’t really run entirely on their own, the beauty of this Travel Guitar is exactly the fact that it works independently without any amplifier to power its electric signal. That being said, the guitar still needs an audio output for you to ‘hear’ what you’re playing. That could be a pair of wired headphones, a speaker with an aux cable, amps with Bluetooth receivers, or even your AirPods via your smartphone.

The Natasha Smart Travel Guitar rocks its own internal sound processor (powered by its own SoC) with pre-amp/post-fader EQ adjustment, built-in effects and tone presets, and an onboard tuner. All you do is switch it on, hook in your headphones, and you can begin playing once you’ve tweaked and adjusted to get the sound you’re looking for. The 2000mAh battery also gives you a staggering 20 hours of play-time.

However, if you’re looking to squeeze a bit more out of your guitar, a USB-C port on the top of its body has you covered. You can connect your smart guitar to a phone running Natasha’s own companion app. The app unlocks an entire world of potential for your guitar, allowing you to access a whole new library of effects that you can layer on to get the sound you want. Once you’re happy, you can record pieces directly within the app, cut/trim/loop them, and even play with a drum machine to add rhythm to your compositions. The entire experience elevates the very idea of guitar playing to something much more rounded and holistic. As a guitarist, the very idea that you don’t need an expensive setup, an accompanying band, or even a laptop to play mini-concerts and gigs seems incredibly freeing. All you need is a guitar, a pair of headphones, and a smartphone to go from practicing and jamming to actual music production. It also helps that the guitar you’re playing looks less like a clunky wooden chamber and more like a slick, star-studded sound-machine…

The Natasha Smart Travel Guitar: Starry Sky Edition starts at $497, offering a lot more functionality than even Yamaha’s silent guitars that can go all the way up to $1500. The guitar is perfect for beginners, enthusiasts, and professionals looking to solo-jam, travel, and extract the most from minimal equipment. The guitar ships with a gig bag for carrying your instrument in, a receiver for amplifiers, an Allen wrench for repairs or to adjust the truss rod, as well as a Type-C cable with a USB and a lightning adapter.

Click Here to Buy Now: $497 $800 (38% Off) Hurry! Less than 3 Days left!

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This “IKEA Guitar” was built almost exclusively using products and materials from IKEA

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“I think it sounds okay for a guitar made out of shelves, a chair, and a baby cot”, says YouTuber tchiksguitars.

There’s probably nothing IKEA won’t sell. They’ve got everything from furniture to food within their four large walls, and you wouldn’t be the first to wonder whether they’ve begun selling electric guitars too (they sell speakers, though), but turns out that’s the one thing they don’t sell. Or rather, they don’t sell ready-made. They do, however, sell the materials you need to build a guitar, as YouTuber Tchiks Guitars has rather kindly demonstrated. Made using materials and accessories found in IKEA’s warehouse section, Tchiks Guitars calls his final product the Vecnå, and even demoed it along with guitar pedals made from IKEA parts too! He calls it “the Ultimate IKEA Hack”, but it’s mostly some ingenious creativity and craftsmanship.

Designer: Tchiks Guitars

The Vecnå (pronounced exactly like the monster from Stranger Things) features a pretty clean, minimalist design with a white body with a cutaway design, wooden knobs, and an f-cut on the top that reveals the hexagonal filler inside the guitar body. The guitar’s bill of materials includes a host of IKEA products along with some standard store-bought components and parts. The neck is repurposed from the top of the STUVA baby crib, while the fretboard uses the MÅLERÅS picture ledge. The body uses veneers and inner filler from the LACK shelf, while the edge has wooden parts from the HENRIKSDAL chair. The knobs are creatively repurposed from the APTILIG chopping board, while the strap buttons use insert-knobs from the KALLAX shelf. Finally, the plate into which the jack is plugged is creatively upcycled from the LILANGEN door handle.

The rest of the guitar uses standard parts, from the frets to the Lace Alumitone pickup (which lights up when powered) and even the keys and strings. Tchiks even created a set of matching pedals made from IKEA products too!

The guitar started out as a joke with the Belgium-based self-taught woodworker going upstairs and telling his wife “I’m gonna make a guitar out of Zoé’s old bed”. She rolled her eyes to the ceiling and asked me “why”. That was enough for the 34-year-old proprietor of Tchiks Guitars to actually set out to see if an IKEA guitar was actually feasible. Turns out, it was more than just that. The guitar looks incredibly classy, with a Scandinavian design touch… and sounds rather wonderful too. I just wish he would ditch the hexagonal paper filler material and make the guitar a semi-acoustic one with a proper inner acoustic chamber!

You can see the process images below, and even get a small taste test of the guitar in action right at the end of this article!

 

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This electric guitar accessory lets you wirelessly listen to your guitar through your TWS earbuds

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Bypassing the amplifier, effect pedal, and pretty much any other conceivable gear associated with electric guitars, the Jack is a tiny device that allows you to connect your electric guitar to other devices via Bluetooth. Touted as a ‘wireless guitar headphone amplifier’, all you have to do is plug Jack into your guitar and it suddenly interfaces with your phone as well as your TWS earbuds, allowing you to play directly into your own ear as you would with a pair of studio monitor headphones… except this hardware is entirely wireless, and compact enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

Designer: Studio Elk

The Jack managed to secure a Red Dot Design Concept Award in 2020 for its clever and compact design. Most smartphones have the ability to process signals from an electric guitar, and the Jack relies on this to bypass the traditional massive amplifier that you see most electric guitars connected to. The Jack’s main piece of hardware is this unit that plugs into the 3/4th-inch audio socket of an electric guitar, basically powering it and sending the electrical signals to the smartphone to interpret.

The smartphone app is where all the magic happens, essentially. Signals from the Jack are sent to the phone, where an app decodes them, turning them into music. You can edit the signal by adding virtual amps and filters to modulate the sound, doing basically what actual gear would do, but instead through software. Finally, the end product plays either on your phone or through TWS earbuds that you place in your ear. This way, you can jam in your own head without having everyone around you listening in on your music (or your neighbors getting perturbed). The Jack’s entirely wireless design means you can just about jam anywhere you want, at home, in a cafe, on the subway, heck… even in an airplane. Your co-passengers may not appreciate having the guitar invading their personal space, though!

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These guitar scissors will make you feel like a cutting rockstar

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We’ve always been warned never to play with sharp tools (unless that’s actually your job), but that never meant these objects themselves couldn’t be playful. No one pays scissors any mind, at least until they’ve gone dull and unusable, and they’re often banished to drawers or containers after use. It’s mostly for safety reasons but also because scissors aren’t much to look at anyway. Not these scissors, though! This pair you’ll want to always be up on display, like a trophy honoring your snipping talents. Or maybe you just want to have it both within easy reach as well as in your line of sight because these stratocaster scissors won’t only help you cut through paper, it might even help you cut through boredom and mental blocks for your next design project.

Designer: Nikken Cutlery

Click Here to Buy Now: $21 $25 (15% off at checkout). Hurry, storewide Black Friday sale ends in 24 hours!

Just like any tool, scissors give grief when they don’t work properly. The last thing you need when you’re in a rush or in a state of flow are dull scissors that can’t even cut through the thinnest sheet of paper. At the same time, like any other object, a pair of scissors’ appearance could affect your mental state as well. After all, no one will buy want to buy ugly things or beautiful but broken tools. Fortunately, the Seki Sound scissors are both sharp-looking and actually sharp at the same time.

There’s probably a metaphor to be had here about how music can cut through the soul, but at the end of the day, these guitar-shaped scissors speak for themselves, metaphor or not. Taking inspiration from one of the most iconic electric guitar designs in the world, these shears deserve to have a special place on your desk, preferably within easy reach. You might find yourself wanting to cut more often simply because of the joy of having such a unique piece of equipment in your hand.

These rocking scissors aren’t just about looking like a guitar. A great deal of effort was made to ensure authenticity, down to the curves of the body as well as the contour on its back that you will rarely see. There are also six strings and the exact same number of frets that you’d see on a real guitar. There’s even a matching cap that not only serves as the guitar’s head when not in use, it also offers protection by blocking the sharp point and preventing the scissors from being opened when it’s in place.

And sharp, these scissors definitely are! It calls on the history, tradition, and expertise of Seki in Japan, a city once famed for its swordsmiths and now for its cutlery. Each pair of scissors is sharpened by hand using a two-stage process called Kobabiki, where different whetstones are used to sharpen different edges. Thanks to its rust-resistant stainless steel material, these scissors will be able to cut through paper, vinyl, and even tape without breaking a sweat.

With pens and desk organizers getting some time on the stage that is your desk, it’s only fair that other tools get their time under the spotlight as well. Distinctively playful and astonishingly sharp, these scissors will add a little life to your desk and maybe even inspire you to go through your projects like a riffing rockstar.

Click Here to Buy Now: $21 $25 (15% off at checkout). Hurry, storewide Black Friday sale ends in 24 hours!

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Award-winning Smart Guitar comes with a foldable design and a beginner-friendly interface

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A winner of both the Red Dot Product Design and iF Design Awards, the U-Lab 001 isn’t your average guitar. Sure, if you glanced at it, you’d recognize it as one, but the U-Lab 001 is far from the traditional Spanish-style guitar you’ve come to love. For starters, it has a hollow cutout, doesn’t have any strings, and folds in half on demand. The reason why the U-Lab 001 does all these things is because it’s designed not on the principle of acoustics or electromagnetics (in the case of an electric guitar), but rather on the framework of a smart electronic music device.

Designer: inDare Design Strategy Ltd. for Unknown Galaxy Ltd.

Designed for novices with little formal training in guitar-playing,  the U-Lab 001 provides the perfect launchpad in strumming, chords, finger-picking, and all-around musical theory. For starters, it comes with an impressive folding design that allows it to occupy 1/3rd of its original space when closed down (made possible thanks to the absence of strings). Open it up, however, and the U-Lab 001 becomes a blank canvas for you to sonically paint on with your left and right hands. The right hand rests on two rocker switches that emulate the act of strumming all strings or picking on individual strings, while the fretboard under the left hand comes with a touch-sensitive light-up surface that teaches notes, chords, and overall music theory, along with a companion smartphone app.

The U-Lab 001, being an electronic device, also comes with a built-in speaker that plays back the audio, allowing you to listen in on your performance without needing an amp. A rotary knob above the speaker lets you control volume, and instead of tuning keys at the end of the fretboard, a single knob lets you change your guitar’s scale on command. Want to practice/jam solo? There’s even a headphone jack built into the U-Lab 001 for silent jamming!

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Electric Guitar with Braille fretboard helps the visually impaired master a new instrument

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While simply color-coordinating or backlighting parts of an instrument may work for regular novices, it doesn’t translate to visually impaired users. Vitar hopes to solve that by covering its entire fretboard with Braille keys that can help blind and vision-impaired people navigate their way around a guitar. Vitar, however, isn’t a traditional electric guitar either – it’s a MIDI instrument styled like a guitar, which also unlocks an entire world of potential with electronic music.

If the Vitar looks a little odd at first, it’s because it isn’t your average Spanish guitar. Designed to electronically send signals to a software (technically known as a Digital Audio Workstation), the Vitar comes with keys that you press with your left hand, indicating the notes you want the guitar to play. However, Vitar doesn’t quite stop right there. Each key located in the guitar’s fretboard comes with a Braille letter embossed on it, allowing even the visually impaired to work their way around the instrument. It’s a classic example of a tiny design detail that radically improves the product’s experience for all its users.

Designers: Eojin Roh, Seonjin Baek, Yujeong Shin

The fascinating part about the Vitar is its unconventional design. The way it was made has nothing to do with acoustics, but rather has everything to do with being intuitive and minimizing the learning curve. The Vitar’s body has an odd asymmetric shape that helps users instantly understand which way it’s supposed to be held (one could argue that it isn’t ambidextrous, although that might come across as pedantic). Strings sit in a recessed chamber on the main body, so the hand or guitar pick knows when to stop (while also giving you a place to conveniently rest your fingers). Guidelines across the main body help the hand navigate around the guitar in an instant, so you spend more time jamming and less time figuring out if you’re holding the instrument right.

Buttons on the base of the electric guitar let you control its built-in speaker/amplifier.

Vitar’s most impressive feat, however, remains its Braille keys. One of the most difficult parts of the guitar learning experience is figuring out which fret triggers which note. Sure, a talented guitar can easily pick this up by ear and with repeated practice, but for a novice, it requires a lot of counting down the frets, examining the corresponding string, etc. Just by simply molding Braille letters onto the individual keys, the Vitar makes the process as easy as pressing a button… quite literally.

While the Vitar is targeted towards visually impaired students, even most regular users can benefit from the sheer muscle memory of their fingertips knowing which key is located where, and what button triggers what note. If it helps us regular folk pick up a bit of braille in the process too, that’s an overall win in my book!

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen uniquely designed and shaped electric guitars. Earlier this year, Ezra Feldman unveiled an unconventional ‘curved’ electric guitar that was designed to offer a much more ergonomic and strain-free experince.

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Electric guitar with a curved fretboard offers a much more ergonomic experience

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Meet Curvo, a guitar that’s far from traditional. Although the knee-jerk term is to call Curvo an electric guitar, it is in fact, an electronic guitar that works using touch and velocity sensors sort of like a MIDI controller. The absence of strings, however, isn’t a feature but rather the consequence of a feature. You see, unlike any guitar ever made, Curvo comes with a radically curved fretboard that’s designed to make playing, jamming, and shredding much more comfortable without causing repetitive strain injury to parts of your palm, fingers, and wrist.

Designer: Ezra Feldman

“A guitar is somewhat of a ‘primitive’ instrument and the players have to maneuver themselves around the instrument in order to play – which can lead to the misuse of the instrument”, says Curvo’s designer, Ezra Feldman. “Over time this will result in injury.”

While instances of injury with guitarists is rather rare, Feldman does have a point. The guitar was designed primarily around the fact that it required a straight fretboard with taut strings hovering over it. Remove the strings and you’ve removed the one barrier that’s stopping you from making the guitar more ergonomic. With the strings gone, Feldman was allowed to curve the fretboard, allowing your hand to move much more freely in an arc shape, so your elbow and wrist don’t have to do much of the work. This shifts the movement to your shoulder, reducing the strain on your wrist and your fingers from having to stretch and contort in weird shapes while you play.

Without strings, the Curvo is free to be a much more unique instrument. Rather than relying on electromagnetics and acoustics, Curvo uses sensors to detect which ‘string’ you’re pressing with your left hand, and strumming with your right. sensors built into the entire length of the guitar pick up on a variety of cues, from which string you’re pressing to how hard you’re pressing it. On the right side, velocity sensors capture the intensity of your picking or strumming, as well as which strings you’re plucking away at. All this data is then used to generate audio that corresponds to what you’re playing. Another major benefit of not having strings? The Curvo doesn’t need any sort of tuning, and always stays in tune no matter what.

However, to retain the kind of control you’d get from an electric guitar, the Curvo also comes with a set of knobs on the right to modulate effects and volume.

The way Curvo is constructed is different from your average guitar. While most guitars use wood or composites, Curvo uses Airsonic carbon fiber (like the one found on LAVA MUSIC’s guitars). It also uses soft plastic all along the fretboard, almost mimicking Roli’s Seaboard, and actually allows you to adjust the curvature of the fretboard depending on your own personal anthropometrics and your comfort level. For example, people with shorter arms will need higher curvature as compared to people with longer arms.

Given its electronic nature, Feldman also seized the opportunity to unlock Curvo’s true potential by making its sound infinitely customizable. Just like an electronic MIDI keyboard can pretty much play any sort of sound, Curvo can be programmed to play any sort of sound style too. Its app gives you access to a massive sound back and effect rack, while even letting you remotely adjust your guitar’s tuning to suit your needs. Moreover, you can even record music right to the app, create layers, and produce full-fledged tracks right on your phone!

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Move over Guitar Hero, this MIDI Controller Electric Guitar teaches you how to shred in real life

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Designed to make learning the guitar as easy as pressing buttons, the LUMIN is a MIDI-operated electric guitar that uses a set of illuminated buttons to teach you hand-eye coordination.

MIDI, which stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, is a widely accepted standard behind most synthesizers and electronic music equipment. Its basic principle is to convert physical actions into digital signals, which then get interpreted as musical notes. The LUMIN uses the same technology and implements it on a guitar, with multiple buttons running across the fretboard, and six string-like sensors on the guitar’s body. Hit the button on the fretboard and pluck against the string sensor and the guitar registers the corresponding note, playing it through a device like a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Unlike an electric guitar, which takes electrical signals and passes them through filters, LUMIN is an electronic instrument that creates lines of code that can then be recorded, edited, and manipulated in tonnes of ways.

Designer: Marcus Hsieh

Although it has the potential to be a capable professional instrument, designer Marcus Hsieh envisioned the Lumin to be more of a gateway device, helping teach people how to play the guitar. LUMIN connects to an external gadget like a laptop which runs software with training modules similar to Guitar Hero… except these modules actually teach you how to play the guitar, guiding you through notes, progressions, chords, etc. LED lights built into the individual buttons on the fretboard act as additional visual cues, helping you learn finger placement and chord formations. The lights also change color to let you know if you’ve pressed the buttons correctly, serving as key visual feedback.

“The positive cycle made of learning, practice and positive feedback allows users to improve their skills more and more”, says Marcus. “This is how video games, in general, encourage players to improve their gaming skills, and learning musical instruments should do the same.”

He isn’t wrong though. Video games provide a strong feedback response through a platform that’s much more engaging than real life. Channel it the right way and you can actually train the brain to pick up real skills like coordination, timing, and having good reflexes. The only thing missing in this equation? An actual ear for music!

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