Awesome Guitars

If you had to pick the most simultaneously annoying and disturbing thing you can buy, it would have to be Big Mouth Billy Bass. Simon the Magpie modified one of these singing fish novelties and incorporated it into a bass guitar. Billy not only can slap the strings with his tail but has been circuit bent to produce some insane noises.

Luthier and carpenter tchiksguitars recently injured his wrist and spent 8 weeks wearing a cast that prevented him from using his left hand to grip things. But that didn’t stop him from building this beautiful ash wood guitar, which he made almost entirely with hand tools, with no CNC machining or resin casting.

Burls Art makes guitars out of unusual materials. Having built instruments out of Himalayan salt and jawbreakers, this time he turned his attention to coffee. He built the body using several pounds of beans from Copper Coffee, bathed in clear epoxy. We love the copper accents in included on the finished guitar.

Burls Art has built some pretty interesting guitars. His latest creation incorporates a series of LED lights and mirrors into its body, creating a disco-inspired infinite mirror effect. It really gives the guitar the illusion of a tremendous amount of depth.

We love how the light shows through this unique musical instrument that Burls Art made by carefully cutting, routing and sanding blocks of pink Himalayan rock salt to form its body. It also gives new meaning to the phrase “guitar licks.”

After building himself a beautiful desk out of beautiful Sapele wood, luthier and carpenter tchiksguitars crafted a beautiful electric guitar using pieces of the wood that he took from a shelf in his office. The part where he carves out the curvature of its body is wonderfully satisfying to watch.

There are lots of guitars out there made out of fiberglass or cast resin, but ones made out of actual glass are rare. Morningstar Glass Guitars walks us through the tricky process of building one of their very special instruments, which has both a glass body and a glass neck. The Starlight II shown here sells for $3859.

Snapping a guitar string in the middle of a solo in front of a big audience must suck. Apparently, it didn’t phase the late great Stevie Ray Vaughan. Check out this classic bit of concert footage in which he and the guitar tech worked with the balletic smoothness of a Formula 1 pit stop to switch out guitars.

Musician Tolgahan Çoğulu shows off a unique instrument he put together after his son Atlas gave him the idea. The acoustic guitar uses LEGO studs all along its neck, allowing for microtonal positions throughout the fretboard. The trick was to build a custom 3D printed baseplate for the LEGO bricks to click onto.

Stop. Hammer Time. Musician Alexandr Misko gives the 1990 MC Hammer hit U Can’t Touch This a completely new sound, performing the rhythms of the track on his acoustic guitar. Alexandr’s Russian-accented rap flow brings it all together.

Guitar maker Artem Mayer of Copper Guitars created this crazy custom instrument using 36 packs of instant ramen noodles. After casting them in polyester resin – and adding some delicious seasoning packets – he shaped the body and added a maple wood neck, hardware, and strings.

The members of Italian guitar ensemble 40 Fingers perform an outstanding acoustic cover version of the AC/DC classic Back in Black unlike any we’ve heard before. It has every bit of energy of the original, but with a totally different vibe.

Builder Tim Sway always wanted to create a musical instrument without using any wood in its construction. So he set about crafting a fretless bass guitar from a thick sheet of clear acrylic and aluminum. Despite some challenges along the way, the finished result looks amazing.

Japanese electro-punk group Electronicos Fantasticos is known for making music with unusual instruments. In this clip, musician Ei Wada shows off an electronic guitar known as the “CRTelecaster” that uses feedback created from the screen of an old CRT television set to produce sounds. More CRT goodness here.

Burls Art has made a guitar out of colored pencils before. But this one has its 1200 pencils lying on their sides, giving the unique instrument a more linear and structured appearance. The finished instrument is up for auction on eBay with all proceeds going to Feeding America’s COVID-19 response fund.

Scrap wood City wanted to make a sword out of wood. But rather than just build a weapon, he created a funky musical instrument instead. The three-stringed electric lap guitar features brass and copper hardware, and can be played with a slide like a steel guitar.

Woodworker Adam Zawalich crafted a truly unique electric guitar using concrete and anchoring cement. He started with a burled walnut body which he used to create a silicone mold, and then cast the concrete for the heavyweight guitar. He got a two-for-one deal by using the wood to make a second guitar.

Do you like sitcoms? Then check out this wonderful medley of theme songs from shows like Friends, Seinfeld, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Big Bang Theory, Parks and Rec, and The Office, performed on acoustic guitar by Nathan Mills of Beyond the Guitar.

This unusual guitar effects pedal changes its sound based on whatever liquid you pour into it. Unscrew the watertight lid, pour in the beverage of your choice, and the conductive properties of said liquid will influence signal gain, while its opacity affects the equalization of the sound. Demo video here. (Thanks Mike!)

It’s not the first time someone has built a guitar out of cardboard, but we still think that The Q’s homebrew cardboard Fender Strat is pretty darned awesome. Thanks to an ample coating of epoxy resin, it’s rigid and fully playable.

Judging by their name and their musical prowess, the four members of 40 Fingers have all of their digits intact, and that makes this acoustic guitar medley of Disney songs just that much sweeter. It’s a wonderfully warm bit of ear candy for fans of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Tarzan, Hercules, and Beauty and the Beast.

Inspired by other videos of guitars being made with unconventional materials and techniques, Cranmer Guitars decided to build a custom electric guitar featuring a scene from Super Mario Bros. He created 29,000 pixel blocks by slicing popsicle sticks into perfect squares, dying the wood, then gluing them in small sections.

When it comes to guitars, the strings are one of the most critical elements. But James Bruton built this electronic guitar that’s played not by plucking strings, but by scanning barcodes. It has four necks and uses an Arduino MEGA board to map the scanned data into USB and MIDI signals to control a synthesizer.