Just some random links of music and non-music related sites:
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Gear
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If I own it, it’s strung with D’Addario. The Planet Waves site can be accessed through here as well.
For electrics – I currently, play their Pacifica 611 into a pedal board that goes into their THR-100HD head and cabinet. I also use their THR-5a and THR-10 amps. For acoustic, I play their APX100 6-string and 12-string live.
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A VERY forward thinking company. These guys are really on the cutting edge of amp/guitar concepts. Playing live I have the most flexible tonal palate I’ve ever had (and the smallest pedal board I’ve ever had as well…)
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John Harper is a world class luthier and has the most terrifyingly encyclopedic knowledge guitar I’ve ever seen. He and Chris Fitzpatrick are building some really cool guitars.
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Jonathan Wilson has been delivering his Togaman bowed guitars to substantial acclaim, and now they’re showing up everywhere. Super talented (and very nice) guy with a great product.
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This is a great piece of software. The interface is really intuitive and lends itself well to real-time composition. (And it’s shareware).
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One of my favorite AU amp sims out right now. Mike Scuffham is doing great work and is 100% deserving of your support.
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This is another great piece of software. Incredibly useful for learning tunes, solos, etc. There’s a Java based tuner and metronome on the site as well.
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I’ve played through (and owned) both the Atomic 18 and the 50 watt Reactors and they’re really cool units.
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Radial –
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This is a company that has some really great products. I just picked up their ABY box (which work great). When recording direct with my POD – I like using the Dragster to match the impedance of the pickups. I find the the volume roll off is a little more accurate. This was a really cool trick I picked up from a guitarist named Scott Peterson. Some of his other modeling tips can be found here.
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Awesome audio interface for the pricepoint.
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Some really good sounding bass and guitar cabinet IRs for modeling/performance. Some people grouse about paying for IR’s but these are 2,000 or so for $15. More than fair.
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RedWirez –
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Yes, they’re more expensive IR’s – but up to 96k 24 bit (!!). As of this writing they were giving a marshall cab IR set for free to celebrate their birthday. You can see info on those here.
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Free AU plug in that supports IRs.
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Some plug ins that I end up coming back to for various mangling. The link here is for AUs but they have free VST plug ins as well.
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Sweetwater is a great retailer. Their customer service is top notch and knowledgable and they’re not in the habit of letting me down.
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“Maker of fine classical guitars in Eugene, Oregon. His guitars are built entirely by hand and follow in the tradition of Master luthiers Hauser and Torres”. Worth your time to check out beautiful work Paul’s doing.
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I’ve interviewed Ken Kantor for Guitar-Muse and reviewed both the Lunchbox Junior and their Extortion distortion pedal and I’m perpetually blown away by the quality of work that ZT Amplifiers is outputting.
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Collaborators
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Daren is an extremely talented bassist and composer, and someone I’m lucky enough to collaborate with frequently.
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An unbelievable talent. In addition to our improvised duo project, Duodenum, Carmina also performs solo and in multiple other projects including her duo LINFA.
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Vinny is an unbelievable musician, composer and all-round character. I am incredibly blessed to have had the opportunity to play with him.
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Sahba is a world class Tar and Setar performer. We have performed together a few times but we’re trying to figure out how to work together more in the future.
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Universal Hall Pass/Melissa Kaplan –
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Melissa Kaplan is an incredibly talented vocalist and composer. I was fortunate enough to play on a track (and co-remix a track) on the Universal Hall Pass debut – but all of her material is something that more people should be familiar with.
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Mike Reagan is a friend of mine of many years. In addition to being a Gramy award winning songwriter, and a composer of an animated tv series and dozens of video games. He is one of the most talented human beings I know.
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Teachers
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Take an equal mix of Jimi Hendrix and Paco De Lucia and have them immersed in both Bach and Balkan music and you start to get an idea of Miroslav Tadic. In addition to being one of the heaviest musicians on the planet (he will probably kick me if he ever sees that I put this in print), Miroslav Tadic is an incredible teacher, mentor, guitar builder and human being.
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When I got to CalArts, one of the first things that happened in the very first lesson involved Miroslav telling me, “Your left hand is a mess – it’s completely compromising your playing.” It was something that I was working on, but it wasn’t until I was was able to get some lessons with Jack Sanders in that I fully understood the depth of my problem and what I needed to to to fix it. For that information, I am eternally grateful. In addition to also being an incredible educator, Jack is also an extremely talented musician, luthier and just a fine human being. Make sure you click on his link to see some of the great stuff he’s done.
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Jon Finn is a monster guitarist and a great teacher that I was fortunate enough to know at Berklee. He has several books out on Mel Bay that are all worth investigating.
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Players
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Seeing Dusan live is one of those experiences where you walk away twitching and wondering if you are dreaming. In addition to an incredibly prolific output of guitar literature, he’s also the author of “Counterpoint for Guitar” which will rock your world harder than you thought possible.
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I remember when I first got into the whole looping thing I was really enamored with the Gibson Echoplex rack mount. And in researching that unit, EVERYTHING on the loopers-delight page kept pointing back to this guy Andre – who had written treatises on the turntable guitar style he was poineering. Andre took the looped guitar approach to the outer limits of the stratosphere – with glitch and time shift elements that people are still catching up to. These days in addition to his own original work and a very busy teaching schedule – he plays in Shadow Language, a quartet that focuses on works for electric guitar.
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Jim Thomas from the Mermen –
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If you don’t know his playing you should check out “A Drowning man knows his God” from A Glorious Lethal Euphoria for jaw droppping tone/energy/lyricism. There are some interviews on the Mermen website that detail his rig which produces the most glorious live tones I’ve ever heard.
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is someone whose playing I first came across on the Kudsi Erguner ensemble recordings and someone whose playing I admire a great deal. In addition to his great lyricism, he also just knows how to play with ensembles really well. In many ways – I think we have very similar approaches and when I hear his phrasing in this clip , it reminds me a lot of how I would approach it.
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Joe Gore –
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Yes, I’ve written about him on the Guitar-Muse site – but the fact remains that Joe is a triple threat in that he’s a great writer, a great musician and a really great guy. Check out his Clubbo, Sonic Gore, or Mental 99 site and embrace some of the awesomeness…
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I’ll put more links here eventually – but in the meantime here are some people and things that were incredibly influential to my music making process and if some of these names are unknown to you, they are worth investigating.
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Guitarists/Musicians
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Jimi Hendrix, Paco de Lucia, Yngwie Malmsteen, Jeff Beck, David Torn, Buckethead, Shawn Lane, Allan Holdsworth, Vlatko Stevanovski, Ritchie Blackmore, Sabicas, Segovia, Uli Roth, Bill Frisell, Jonas Hellborg, Bato Andonov, Marco Djordjevic, Dave Fuse, Scott Crosby, Moby Pomerance, Aashish Khan, Randy Gloss, Susan Allen, Ornette, Coltrane, Monk, Mingus, Parker, Steve Swallow, Mick Goodrick, Mitch Hauper, Cliff Whittstruck, Doug Mayer, John Finn, T.M. Stevens, Hahn Rowe, Hugo Largo, Bartok, Stravinsky, Pendereski, Killar, Berg, Webern, Schoenberg, Wagner, Beethovem Bach, Black Sabbath, The Ruins, John Zorn, Frith Frith, Enver Izmailov, Jason Becker, Marty Friedman, Scotty Anderson, Danny Gatton, Takemitsu, Bernard Hermann, King Crimson, Kudsi Erguner, Simon Shaheen, Omar Faruk Tebilek, Omou Sangare, Sahba Motallebi, Homayun Sakhi, Joseph Matthias Hauer, Ivo Papasov, Taraf de Haidouks, Patty Barkas, Patty Waters, The Bentmen, Hector Zazou, Shakti, John McLaughlin, Zakir, Shankar, Alim Qasimov, Koto Music, Kaygum Music, Public Enemy, Charming Hostess, Charlie Patton, Son House, Ledbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Duck Baker, Kim Suk Chul, Bad Brains, Henry Rollins, old school hard core punk, Sugarcubes, The Fixx, Big Country, K.D. Lang, Patsy Kline, Billie Holliday, Ran Blake.
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Films/Directors and Actors
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Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Canton, Character, The Element of Crime, Festen, Bronson, Almost any Orson Welles film, Last Man on Earth (Vincent Price), Animal House, Mallrats, Oldboy, Any early Stephen Chow film, any Ng man tat, Rumble in the Bronx, Sammo Hung, The Producers (the original is still the greatest comedy ever made), Halloween, Pretty much any George Romero zombie film, Angel Heart, Sante Sangre, Holy Mountain, Wages of Fear, Valhalla Rising…
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Literature (this list alone could take many pages)
Very condensed list here:
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Kafka, Thomas Bernhardt, Sarte’s No exit, Borges, Yukio Mishima, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Bruno Schultz, Bill Waterson, Charles Schultz, Noam Chomsky, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Ellul, Meditations, Epictetus, Philip Toshio Sudo, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and many many more.
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Visual Art:
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Giacometti, Dali, Tanguy, Rembrandt, Goya, Antoni Gaudi, Picasso, Beksinski, Francis Bacon, Nan Goldin, George Grosz, Otto Dix, R. Crumb, and many many more.
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Readin’ (as opposed to “Writin'” or “‘Rithmatic”)
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Guitar-Muse – I write a weekly column for them interviewing different manufacturers and players.
Tone-Fiend – Hosted by Seymour Duncan, the previously mentioned Joe Gore has created one of the best guitar-specific gear-related resources on the web. If you’re in to making your own pedals or doing your own wiring – this is a tremendous resource!
Live4Guitar – Emir Hot’s very cool site with high quality and very inexpensive online guitar instruction.
SoundCloud: Powering all the site’s audio.
Vimeo: Powering all the site’s video.
WordPress: Powering the site itself.
GP Magazine Consulting editor, author and guitarist Michael Ross’ excellent guitar oriented site with an emphasis on the modern, adventurous and the cutting edge. I also recommend that you check out his electronica guitar releases as Prehab.
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Forums
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This is a great forum for general techniques and approaches for laptop and digital guitar.
Tremendous resource for 7/8 or other string number enthusiasts…
Very cool people. Very cool product.
Other publications would do well to follow the GW forum model.
I dig the publication – and there are some cool resources here.
Cool forum with modeling info.
Are there other guitar or music related sites that you think I should list here and/or check out? Please send a link to guitar.blueprint@gmail.com!
GuitArchitecture.org 
I’m a maker of fine classical guitars in Eugene Oregon and Im interested in exchanging links. My guitars are entirely hand made (without power tools) and follow in the tradition of Hauser and Torres. Please let me know if this interests you.