Chicago Music Exchange on eBay

CME is on eBay! Our seller ID is: ChicagoMusicExchange and you can visit our store at: http://stores.ebay.com/ChicagoMusicExchange

From time to time, we put some very rare and special vintage guitars in our eBay store. Make sure to check it out and bookmark it when you have the chance! Here is just a taste…

Upcoming Show: Great White @ The House of Blues - 2/12/2010

This upcoming Friday February 12, 2010, the band known as Great White will be performing in Chicago at the House of Blues. This will be a great show! Tickets for this show can be purchased directly from Live Nation for a special offer price of 2 for only $10… For more information visit: http://www.livenation.com/edp/eventId/411073

Great White w/Rev Luv
Friday 02/12/10 at 8:30 PM - 17+
The House of Blues
329 North Dearborn Street
Chicago, IL 60654

Them Crooked Vultures Offering Full Album Stream

Them Crooked Vultures have posted YouTube streams of all the tracks from their forthcoming CD. The decision to stream the disc – which hits record stores on November 17 – was apparently made in response to an unauthorized leak of the album.

Chicago Music Exchange on Comcast On Demand Local

We are proud to announce that Chicago Music Exchange has been featured in Comcast On Demand’s Local Channel. They made a short piece on our store and have captured the essence of our location. If you have a moment, take a look at it!

Here is the link to the Comcast Listing: http://www.comcast.net/video/chicago-music-exchange/1282368715/

CME Store Review on Guitar Fixation

Guitar Fixation has written a great review on our shop recently. Check it out on their website! It’s been an honor to have such a write-up and we would like to share an excerpt from it:

“The shop is as close as you can get to guitar heaven.  Not only do they carry nearly every guitar that you can imagine, but the store also has a very comfortable and relaxed vibe to it. From the sheer size of the space to the comfortable sofas that are everywhere – this place redefines the guitar shopping experience.”

Read the full article here:

http://www.guitarfixation.com/guitar_shops/more/chicago_music_exchange

Gibson Foundation Sponsors the 10th Annual Americana Music Festival in Nashville

This is a banner year for the wide-armed “Americana” music brand. An Americana category has been added to the Grammy Awards, Elvis Costello followed the duo of Allison Krauss and Robert Plant into the loosely defined genre with his Secret, Profane and Sugarcane, and Billboard published the debut Americana sales chart as part of its first supplement devoted to the category.

Gary Rossington on Playing SGs, Les Pauls and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s New God & Guns

The name of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s new God & Guns is missing one of the disc’s most important “G’s” — guitars. But they’re only absent in that title, because track-for-track it’s dozen songs feature some of the biggest, brawniest tones in the legendary southern rock band’s 30-plus-years career.

10 Guitar-Blasting “Sons” of Jimi Hendrix

One way to assess the breadth of Jimi Hendrix’s enduring influence on music is to look at some of the guitarists he’s inspired. Here’s a list of 10 — some obvious, some not — who have not only carried on Jimi’s licks and tricks, but subscribed to his artistic message: “be yourself.”

Classic Writers Revisited: All Star Tributes To Musical & Literary Icons

Next month the unlikely duo of Son Volt’s Jay Farrar And Death Cab For Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard will release One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: A Tribute To Big Sur, a collection of twelve songs that were inspired by Jack Kerouac’s legendary 1962 novel Big Sur and will accompany an upcoming documentary of the same name. That got us thinking about other tributes to musical and literary icons, so here’s a quick list of some of the artists who came to mind. If you’ve got any additions, feel free to post them below in the comments section since we just finished our summer reading list.

Legendary Innovator & Guitarist Les Paul Passes Away at 94

Les Paul (1915 - 2009)… We love and miss you.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. -  Acclaimed guitarist and inventor Les Paul died this week from complications of severe pneumonia at White Plains Hospital in New York at the age of 94. He revolutionized the music industry with the invention of the Les Paul Electric Guitar and Overdub Multitrack Recording. According to Gibson Guitar, Les Paul died with his family and friends by his side.

Born Lester William Polsfuss in Waukesha, Wisconsin on June 9, 1915, Paul was already performing publicly as a honky-tonk guitarist by the age of 13. In the late 1930s Paul began constructing his own electric guitar and eventually created his own guitar in the 1940s, this groundbreaking design would become the template for Gibson’s best-selling electric, the Les Paul model, which was introduced in 1952. Today, countless musical legends still consider Paul’s iconic guitar unmatched in sound and prowess. Among Paul’s most enduring contributions are those in the technological realm, including ingenious developments in multi-track recording, guitar effects, and the mechanics of sound in general.

Tinkering with electronics and guitar amplification since his youth, Les Paul began constructing his own electric guitar in the late ’30s. Unhappy with the first generation of commercially available hollowbodies because of their thin tone, lack of sustain, and feedback problems, Paul opted to build an entirely new structure. He came up with this idea by experimenting with guitar strings on a railroad track and exploring how the sound vibrations traveled through the solid metal rails.

“I was interested in proving that a vibration-free top was the way to go,” he has said. ‘I even built a guitar out of a railroad rail to prove it. What I wanted was to amplify pure string vibration, without the resonance of the wood getting involved in the sound.”

This gave rise to the modern day solid body electric guitar. According to Gibson Guitar, in the early 1950s, Gibson would cultivate a partnership with Paul that would lead to the creation of the guitar he’d seen only in his dreams. In 1948, Gibson elected to design its first solidbody, and Paul, a self-described “dyed-in-the-wool Gibson man,” seemed the right man for the job. Gibson avidly courted the guitar legend, even driving deep into the Pennsylvania mountains to deliver the first model to newlyweds Les Paul and Mary Ford.

“Suddenly, it was recognized that power was a very important part of music,” Paul once said. “To have the dynamics, to have the way of expressing yourself beyond the normal limits of an unamplified instrument, was incredible. Today a guy wouldn’t think of singing a song on a stage without a microphone and a sound system.”

As an inventor, Paul helped bring about the rise of rock ‘n’ roll and multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then carefully balance the tracks in the finished recording. With Ford, his wife from 1949 to 1962, he earned 36 gold records and 11 No. 1 pop hits, including “Vaya Con Dios,” “How High the Moon,” “Nola” and “Lover.” Many of their songs used overdubbing techniques that Paul the inventor had helped develop.

“I could take my Mary and make her three, six, nine, 12, as many voices as I wished,” he recalled. “This is quite an asset.”

“The world has lost a truly innovative and exceptional human being today. I cannot imagine life without Les Paul,” said Henry Juszkiewicz, Chairman and CEO of Gibson Guitar. “He would walk into a room and put a smile on anyone’s face. His musical charm was extraordinary and his techniques unmatched anywhere in the world.”

Les Paul has since become the only individual to share membership into the Grammy Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and the National Broadcasters Hall of Fame. He is survived by three sons, a daughter, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Until recently he had a standing gig at New York’s Iridium Jazz Club, where he would play with a who’s-who of famed musicians. A private Funeral service will be held in New York. A service in Waukesha, WI will be announced at a later date. Details will follow and will be announced for all services. Memorial tributes for the public will be announced at a future date. The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Les Paul Foundation, 236 West 30th Street, 7th Floor, New York, New York 10001.

Motley Crue To Put Crue Fest On Hiatus Until 2011

Motley Crue will put its annual Crue Fest on ice next year in order to focus on its next album. Speaking to Billboard.com, bassist Nikki Sixx said that when this year’s Crue Fest winds down in about a month, the band will take “quite a bit of time off.”

5 Greatest Woodstock Moments

Don’t feel bad if you were too young, too broke or too square to make it to the original Woodstock Festival in Bethel, N.Y. way back in 1969. As we’ve recently discovered, most the people that were there can’t remember much about it anyway.

Lollapalooza 2009 in Chicago

Over the past weekend here at Chicago Music Exchange, we have been visited by some great musicians and bands. We would like to thank each and every one of them for taking the time out of their busy schedule and checking out our store. It was a big weekend for Chicago as Lollapalooza was hosted in Grant Park. Many of the acts paid us a visit and purchased some amazing instruments. We hope you all had a wonderful experience.

Thank-You.

Depeche Mode - http://2009.lollapalooza.com/band/depeche-mode/photos
Ben Harper - http://2009.lollapalooza.com/band/ben-harper-relentless7/photos
Fleet Foxes - http://2009.lollapalooza.com/band/fleet-foxes/photos
The Decemberist - http://2009.lollapalooza.com/band/the-decemberists/photos

Check out a recap of the event at: http://lollapalooza.com/blog/index.php

Amp & Guitar Repair at Chicago Music Exchange

Does your favorite guitar need a little TLC?

Do you have some old gear that could use some repair?

Our guitar techs specialize in everything from set-ups to full vintage restoration. We are experts at fret leveling/replacement, neck resets, high-end woodworking, electronics repairs and customer modifications. Broken acoustic braces or even major reconstruction is not a problem. Superior pickup replacement or re-wiring and expert body work is also part of what we do.

Our electronics tech will breathe new life into dead gear. We specialize in tube and solid state guitar amps, but also service pro audio, effects pedals, and most consumer electronics. We can restore and repair almost any tube or solid state guitar and bass amplifiers. We strive to preserve the authenticity of the amplifiers, while restoring them to their proper working condition. Your amps will sound like they were intended to sound (maybe for the first time!).

In addition to amps, we also repair most pro audio including mixing consoles, power amps, mic preamps, compressors, effects units and just about any other type of analog musical equipment.

If it’s broken, we can fix it!

Contact us for more information: 773.525.7773 - electronics@chicagomusicexchange.com

Huss & Dalton Acoustic Guitars

We are proud to announce that we are now Huss & Dalton acoustic dealers. Their instruments are elegant and sound exquisite. Check them out! This adds to our fine collection of acoustic guitars including Santa Cruz, Martin, Taylor, and Gibson.