Forget luaus and Tiny Tim, ukuleles are hot: Long-ridiculed instrument stages a tuneful comeback.

Beatle's first guitar auctioned: Paul McCartney's first guitar, a Rex acoustic, is going up for sale later this month at Cooper Owen's Music Legends auction at Abbey Road Studios in London on 28 July, and is expected to fetch more than £100,000.

www.MeteoriteGuitarPicks.com: Plectrums from outer space! These picks are made from 4.5 billion* year old meteorites. At prices in the $135 region you'll need to remember to hang on to them and not chuck them into the audience at the end of a gig.
(* That word "billion" always confuses me. Is that the real mathematically-correct 1,000,000,000,000 or the modern Americanised 1,000,000,000, i.e. a thousand-million?)

Yves Carbonne Official Web site: this guy plays a fretless 10-string bass (that's individual strings, not strings grouped together in courses), and apparently he's getting a couple of 12-string basses built next! Check out also Jerzy Drozd who build these monster basses.

Can't afford a Trussart?

How about a much cheaper alternative? Introducing the OLP McSwain Tin Top guitar featuring a "real light-up industrial style gauge". What's that all about then?

Metallica to appear on The Simpsons: Wow! Homer and family will look positively three-dimensional next to them.

BB King bids farewell to festival: BB King has performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland for the last time, having played there for more than 20 years.