| Friday, January 04, 2008 3:46 PM  Casual music listeners are getting more and more used to the idea of television commercials and series doing what the radio used to do: tipping us off to new musical favorites. And 2007 certainly was a solid year for the ad gurus, diamond companies, and sweater shillers turning folks on to a bunch of songs and artists that plenty might’ve missed otherwise. Here are a few of our recent TV ad favorites: More...
| Friday, January 04, 2008 3:16 PM Rush's Snakes & Arrows Added to Best Albums of '07 List Due to Constant Harassment More...
| Friday, January 04, 2008 10:55 AM Let’s face it, college may be fun, but getting stuck with a lame roommate isn’t. Hopefully you’ll be stuck with a cool person to share your room with—you know, the kind who’s always at his girlfriend’s place and always has leftover pizza in the mini-fridge for you to snack on. However, just in case you’re not that lucky, below are 10 CDs that will hopefully drive him or her crazy enough to sleep in the hallway. More...
| Thursday, January 03, 2008 4:06 PM In theory, the incredible advances in home recording thanks to digital technology—and conversely declining prices for such gear—put professional music production within the grasp of every musician. All too often, however, I encounter guitarists who are a few months into using their new computer-based “better than CD quality” systems and already on the point of utter frustration about not being able to get studio quality results out of their gear. This new series on Gibson.com aims to help rectify that, and begins with this nugget of wisdom: however advanced the technology, you still need to learn some good, old-fashioned studio technique if you hope to record professional sounding guitar tracks. More...
| Thursday, January 03, 2008 3:03 PM Some of the most distinctive guitar sounds in the rock canon have come from the hands of Billy Gibbons and his legendary ’59 Les Paul, nicknamed Pearly Gates. A vintage car and guitar collector and authority (see his book Billy F Gibbons: Rock + Roll Gearhead), Billy Gibbons’ biggest claim to fame has been as ZZ Top’s guitarist. While always “bad and nationwide,” ZZ Top became tres of the most famous hombres in the world, thanks to their ’80s videos which featured?what else??badass custom cars and guitars. The sight of Billy Gibbons and bassist Dusty Hill doing their choreographed moves, holding matching white Explorers, is an iconic one. Those instruments were made for ZZ Top’s Afterburner Tour by Matthew Klein of the Gibson Custom Shop. Klein worked on many of those now-famous outré guitar finishes that became part of the ZZ Top legend: sheepskin covered guitars, rhinestone-studded guitars (used in the Back to the Future Part III and made from rhinestone belts provided by Gibbons), and the white Explorers. In 1986, Klein also made “see-through” lattice-work Firebird-style guitars played by the band on the MTV boat party celebrating the unveiling of the refurbished Statue of Liberty. More...
| Thursday, January 03, 2008 11:52 AM You don’t ever really want to lose it, that energy you felt at basement shows as a kid, the whole band set up on a concrete floor in the corner, vocals a shredded blare coming through a guitar amp and the smells of sweat and mildew mixing in the stuffy, invigorating air. But you do, somehow, over years of touring, as basements turn to clubs and then theaters, Mom’s station wagon turning into a van and trailer, maybe a bus. So when you’re put back into the DIY basement-show equivalent later on, you sometimes don’t remember that energy so much as the frustration of not being able to hear, the cramped setup and the dejection of leaving the show with no cash. More...
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