Guitars

Davis Guggenheim calls himself a "Behind the Music" junkie, watching every episode of the VH1 show chronicling famous rock stars' rise and fall and rise again amid triumph and self-destruction. He loves it, he says, but the Academy Award-winning director of "An Inconvenient Truth" had other ideas for his own documentary on the electric guitar.

"I want it!" squealed 13-year-old Hiiaka Kaneao, pointing to a sparkly, hot pink, star-shaped bass guitar hanging inside a pink fur-lined booth. Her high-pitched voice is music to the ears of the guitar's maker, Daisy Rock Guitars. The Los Angeles retailer's colorful and smaller guitars for girls and women have gained worldwide popularity in the last several years and signaled a growing trend within the traditionally male-dominated guitar industry.

FOR Police fans observant enough to notice each scuff, scrape and scar of the battered brown 1961 Fender Telecaster that Andy Summers trots out at each concert on the trio's celebrated reunion tour, it's tantalizing to imagine every gig, every rehearsal, every musicianly quarrel it's been part of over the last three decades.

When Joe Ganzler found Gladys, it was love at first sight. She had a curvaceous body and graceful neck. When he held her in his arms and turned her on, she filled with electricity and purred. "The belle of the ball," Ganzler said. Ganzler, 51, has been married three times but has fallen for just one guitar. Gladys, as a former owner named it, is a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard with a sunburst finish.

There aren't too many mean-looking things in Cupertino, Calif., this sleepy Silicon Valley haunt of Apple Inc. employees and overachieving middle schoolers. But there's something gruesome growing in one corner of town: Halo Custom Guitars Inc. Fueled by a resurgence in heavy-metal music and its numerous sub-genres, Halo makes and sells evil-looking instruments with bodies carved to resemble rotting flesh, distended eyeballs and bone.

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. -- It's a familiar tune, a sad lament actually, about a product falling victim to counterfeiters. Lately, they've been picking on guitars. Last month, a Long Island music dealer was accused of selling $90,000 worth of knockoffs of classic Gibsons, a guitar known for its deep, melodic sound and used by virtually every country, rock and blues artist from Elvis Presley to Eric Clapton.

Robotics technology developed by German company Tronical Gmbh in partnership with Gibson Guitar Corp. enables Gibson's newest Les Paul model to tune itself in about two seconds. For users who purchase the add-on technology, the guitar recognizes pitch. Then its processor directs motors on its six tuning pegs to tighten or loosen the strings accordingly. The Gibson Les Paul guitar model with Blue Silverburst finish goes on sale globally Friday.

They're built around wooden cigar boxes, just like untold thousands of homemade guitars patched together across America since the 1800s. But no minstrel-show performer or sharecropper bluesman too poor for a store-bought guitar would know what to do with one of these. They're Lowebow-Hill Harps -- double-necked, electrified monsters with strings for both bass and guitar and hookups for paired amplifiers. And they can wail.

Blowing a kiss to the audience and hugging every judge and presenter onstage, an exuberant Pablo Sainz Villegas, 28, of Spain took the $25,000 Stotsenberg Prize on Friday in the closing ceremony of the first Parkening International Guitar Competition at Pepperdine University in Malibu.

Because Dan Crane has for several years played a real guitar in the faux-French indie bands Les Sans Culottes and Nous Non Plus, you might suspect that he would have been content to leave the world of pretend guitar playing to the instrumentally challenged. Wrong. Performing under the alias Bjorn Turoque (pronounced \o7b-yorn to-rock\f7) since 2003, the New York-based writer and musician has become an air guitar aficionado.