Jackson Dinky vs. Ibanez RG Shootout Review

http://bit.ly/nua9uu The Jackson Dinky and Ibanez RG are long-time favorites in the rock and metal guitar community. Both represent excellent choices for rock players looking for a new axe with a history of getting the job done right. In a spirit of fostering healthy competition and debate, your intrepid staff here at Gear-Vault have decided to put these two legendary planks side by side to see how different they might be from each other and which you should buy.

Both guitars chosen for this shootout are within the same price bracket, feature double locking tremolo systems (Ibanez RG420 has the Edge III and Jackson DKMG has a License Floyd Rose), hot pickups, fast necks and brilliant colors. However, the playability are not quite the same. The Ibanez have more of wide neck, whereas, the Jackson has more of "C" shape neck. We'll first take a look at the Jackson Dinky DKMG, then take a look at the Ibanez RG420 for comparison. Also, take a look at the Ibanez RG2EX1 vs RG321 Shootout we did back in May.

Jackson Dinky DKMG

The Dinky is a Jackson classic and show the kind of features and appointments that the company is known for. Rooted in the “super Strats” of the 1980’s, the Dinky has a double cutaway Alder body, a bolt-on quartersawn hard rock maple neck, and a compound radius ebony fingerboard. There are several Dinky models in the line to choose from, with electronics ranging from a single humbucker to dual humbuckers to a hum-single-single configuration. There is a 7-string model and a lefty available, as well as trem and hardtail models. The Dinky is a true California hot rod, born to burn and rock hard. Compare Prices: Dinky vs. RG

Ibanez RG series

The Ibanez RG series of guitars are possibly the most numerous guitars ever made in terms of sheer number of models available and are certainly the most popular line of guitars Ibanez has ever produced. They are among the most popular rock and metal guitars ever and were first made in 1987 as derivatives of the Jem and Universe Ibanez models as played by rock legend Steve Vai. Like the Dinky, the RGs are super Strat-derived and feature double cutaway bodies, various combinations of pickups, trem and non-trem styles, and six-, seven-, and even eight-string versions. The RG series represents some of the best ideas of Japan’s instrument makers, ideas that have stood the test of time and that add up to a whole bunch of guitars that have made a whole lot of rockers happy over the years. Compare Prices: RG vs. Dinky

So which one is right for you? Only you can make that decision. What it comes down to is design philosophy: do you want an American-style California custom or would you rather be put under the spell of the Tokyo Drift? Either way, you will end up with an excellent guitar with great fit and finish and a pedigree that is pure rock and roll. Sounds like a win/win situation, if there ever was one.




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Dot On Shaft Guitars Announces New DOS Record Label

http://bit.ly/oRSQUp


Dot On Shaft Guitars, which has quickly become Canada’s fastest-growing maker of fretted instruments, continues its conquest of the music industry with the launching of its very own record label, DOS Records. The label, a subsidiary of Dot On Shaft/Carparelli Guitars, will join the company’s two brick-and-mortar retail stores, its online store, and its music academy and makes Dot On Shaft Canada’s first guitar maker to open a record company.

DOS is quickly becoming a major player in the Canadian music scene and the new record label will only add to that reputation. Dot On Shaft founder Mike Carparelli told Gear-Vault “It was inevitable to launch DOS Records seeing that over the past years we’ve received so much unsolicited music from artists around the world. The logical next step was to find the right people and launch another dream!” DOS VP Paul Merryweather will assist in this, utilizing his own experience and contacts within the music industry.

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DOS Records will run its main operations out of Toronto, Ontario but is interested in more than Canadian bands. The label wants to hear any bands that feel they deserve a chance to be heard, no matter if they are from down the block or from the other side of the world.



Bands can submit through the DOS Records website, www.dosrecordlabel.com, which the company hopes will become a go-to web destination for aspiring musicians, as the site will also provide up-and-comers access to all aspects of record production, including audio and video recording, producers, engineers, songwriters, and studios. The goal of the label is to expose and celebrate new independent music and a world-wide level.



The label officially opened its doors in June, 2009 with the album release of its first signed band, littleSUNDAY. Dot On Shaft also endorses many fine musicians, including Lucas Rossi, Suzie McNeil, and Mick Box, guitarist for 70’s legends Uriah Heep.

By Mike O’Cull @evernote @facebook @hi5 @jaiku @myspace @orkut @picasa @plerb @smugmug @soundcloud @sugarsync @tinypic @wordpress @zooomr

Leo Fender & George Fullerton introduces Broadcaster - Telecaster 1950

http://bit.ly/mTC1hC The 20th century will be remembered as an age of technology. And the electric guitar has been one of the most benign technologies to emerge from our troubled outgoing century. Like the innovations of Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, the electric guitar is a great populist invention. For the most part, it wasn’t dreamed up by people with college degrees in design engineering but by hard-traveling musicians and practical-minded businessmen clawing their way out of the Great Depression.

One of the greatest of these pragmatic mid-century geniuses was Clarence Leo Fender. Born on a farm near Anaheim, California in 1909, Leo Fender was operating his own radio repair shop in nearby Fullerton by the mid Forties. Thanks to the post-WWII economic boom, this was an era of great prosperity, marked by exciting new inventions like television, a middle-class migration out to the suburbs and the birth of sleek new design aesthetic that was streamlining everything from home furnishings to automobiles to electric shavers and hair dryers. Opportunities were plentiful for entrepreneurs and inventors of every stripe, which suited Leo Fender just fine.

Circa 1943, Fender built a very simple solidbody electric guitar that he’d rent out from his shop. (Fender Radio Repair also rented P.A. systems and even a panel van with speakers mounted on top to advertise local events!) In a garage out back, Leo began making lap steel guitars under K&F brand name in partnership with Doc Kauffman, another bailed out of the business in 1946, Leo continued on his own, starting Fender Electric Instruments in 1948. One of the first people he hired was George Fullerton, who became his assistant and lifelong business associate.

“Leo was quite a simple man in his dress and his actions, even though he was a genius,” says Fullerton, who still lives in the town whose name he shares. (He is distantly related to the family that founded Fullerton.) At first, George was reluctant to go to work for his friend Leo. “But then one day Leo took me to lunch and said, ‘I’m interested in designing and building a solidbody electric guitars. Would you be interested in going in with me on that?’ That really turned me on. So on February 28, 1948, I started working full-time with Leo.”

The guitar Fender and Fullerton were working on would initially be known to the world as the Broadcaster, and ultimately, the Telecaster. Nearly everything about the instrument was completely revolutionary, starting with its bolt-on neck, a Leo innovation that allowed the instrument to be dismantled far more easily and quickly that a conventional guitar, where the neck was glued to the body via tongue-in-groove joint. Says Fullerton, “Leo decided that what we needed to do was design an instrument where you could replace any part in a few minutes and have the player back to work, and not cost him an arm and a leg.”

The Broadcaster was designed to be a practical, affordable, workingman’s instrument. The body was an unadorned slab of solid wood, a design intended to eliminate feedback and the uneven resonant properties of an electrified archtop. Fender was out to give his electric Spanish guitar the clear, clean tone he greatly admired in steel guitars. “We decided that we should make the body at least resemble a conventional guitar a little bit,” says Fullerton. “We put a cutaway on it, so you could get at all the frets. Since it was solid wood, we had to make it smaller than a conventional hollowbody, so that it would be light enough for the player to hold comfortably.”

Dissatisfied with the uneven magnetic response of Beauchamp’s horseshoe-style pickup design, Leo devised pickups with individual pole pieces. In addition, the Broadcaster’s frets were inserted directly into the neck itself, rather than into a separate fingerboard glued to the neck, and the tuning keys were all on the same side of the headstock. It was the first time that these innovations—many of them devised with input form local country-and-western players—appeared on a guitar.

The instrument was still called the Broadcaster when it first came on the market in 1950. But fearing a legal tussle with the Gretsch company, which manufactured a Broadkaster drum kit, Fender changed the name to Telecaster in 1951. “We’d named it the Broadcaster because, in the early days, radio broadcasting was the main thing for music,” recalls Fullerton. “But television was becoming popular right about the same time that we had to change the name. [Television eclipsed radio as America’s main entertainment medium in the years between 1947 and 1955.] We thought, ‘Now we’ve moved up a step.’ So we called it the Telecaster.”

But it was the ton, no the name, that made the Telecaster an instant success in the Fifties, and an instrument that is still widely played today. Here at a new century, the Telecaster is a cornerstone of our collective notion of what an electric guitar sounds like. “Once we got the Telecaster finished and put into production, we couldn’t make them fast enough,” says Fullerton. “And then Leo told me, ‘Now we need to start thinking about an electric bass.’ Of course, at the time, there was no such thing.”

Fender Broadcaster Guitar

Read more of the invention of Leo Fender’s invention of the Precision Bass. @evernote @facebook @hi5 @jaiku @myspace @orkut @picasa @plerb @smugmug @soundcloud @sugarsync @tinypic @wordpress @zooomr