Today is March 1st St. David's day, the national day of Wales, when all Welshmen wear a daffodil (the national flower) and sing the national anthem "Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau" (the old land of my fathers).

There are quite a few guitar models listed in the guitar-list.com database. I thought it would be useful to see how many there are in each category, using the IBM ManyEyes visualization tools. The size of each circle is the number of different models of that brand name. You can click on the links below to explore the diagrams for each type of guitar.

Big hair, diveboming tremolos and ferocious finger tapping: it all began with 80's guitar master Eddie Van Halen. At the recent NAMM 2007 show Eddie announced a new licensing deal with Fender.

The NAMM show is over for another year. It's the US industry trade show is for retailers and manufacturers of musical instruments and products. The news is that guitars will generally still have six strings, although some new models will be available in slightly different shapes, and a range of different colours.

We don’t know much about the life of legendary Delta blues guitarist Robert Johnson, beyond his 29 recorded songs and a couple of grainy black and white photographs.

It’s that time of year again – when we get the box of Christmas decorations out of the attic and see if the lights still work. It’s also a time when guitar heroes climb into the attic of rock, and rummage in the dusty box of Christmas tunes for a seasonal hit.

In September's issue of the British Medical Journal, G.P. David Connell speculates about the unnaturally long fingers of bluesman Robert Johnson . Based on pictures and contemporary accounts, Connell thinks that Johnson had Marfan Syndrome .

OLGA (On-line Guitar Archive) a venerable library of guitar and bass tablature has been shut down. It has been around for years, used by a generation of learner guitar players. OLGA has been taken down by legal action twice before, in 1996 and 1998, but recovered. This time it looks serious, the site has been down for a few months already.

The rights to the songs of Jimi Hendrix have been sold for $15 million to a private bidder. The un-named person bought the rights from the estate of Mike Jeffrey, Jimi's manager. The somewhat mysterious Mike Jeffrey died in a plane crash three years after Jimi's own tragic death.

As part of Volkswagen's latest US marketing campain, drivers buying a new VW car between Oct. 3 and Dec. 31 will get a First Act GarageMaster guitar, which can play through the audio system of select VW models. The video is the Slash VW commerical from YouTube.

In a recent article in UK newspaper The Independent, guitar expert Paul Alcantara picked his ten-best acoustic guitars. They are listed in order of retail price: