Friday, March 25, 2011

Aethertone Custom Guitars

Matt Hancock, creator of Aethertone custom guitars has started his own blog -- http://aethertone.blogspot.com/ -- and I'm definitely staying tuned!

Matt has customised three guitars so far, but hey, he's only been at it for a year and a half.

But anyone with an eye for detail can immediately spot the amount of painstaking work he puts into his art -- from the faux burnished metal plates to the hundreds of painted-on screws that appear, uncannily, to be almost 3-dimensional!

His second project -- a Steampunk'd Les Paul Studio is featured in this pic.

Check out my earlier post on Matt's Aethertone AE1 Stratocaster here.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Dunlop 65 Ultraglide String Cleaner Product Review

Nickel plated guitar strings have never been the best of friends with my grubby fingers.  I have the sort of corrosive finger oils that routinely turn a shiny, new unwound string a unique shade of brown-red in less than an hour.

And for as long as I've been playing, I've always had to pre-treat new strings with some sort of corrosion inhibitor -- WD-40 and lemon oil being among my earlier investigations.  But I needed something that didn't leave a residual smell that followed me to bed and continued to linger around for that morning coffee.

Since the WD-40 and Old English lemon oil debacles, I've been an enthusiastic tester of nearly every commercial product marketed as a 'string cleaner' -- everything from ozone-eating aerosol fingerboard sprays, to wooden dowels with pre-soaked cotton applicators that dried out too easily, to a slew of plastic bottles filled with mysterious liquids that would have Erin Brockovich breaking down the front door. 

I could probably do a string cleaner shootout review of products past and present from memory alone.

But we won't go there.  Yet.

Having gotten hold of a 2 oz. bottle of Dunlop 65 Ultraglide recently, I can honestly say that this is the best string cleaner that I've tried.

Ultraglide.  Gotta love that name!

It takes a few hard squeezes of the bottle to get the Ultraglide flowing to moisten the built-in cotton applicator which is then run along the length of each string.  And other than providing a slick but not overly-greasy feel, my strings stayed shiny after a sweaty 3-hour workout at my regular blues-rock gig without so much as a wipedown between sets!

I've really become a fan of these Dunlop conditioning products.  Check out my earlier review of Dunlop 65 Lemon Oil for fretboards here.

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...