After being wowed by Matt Bellamy and his incredible performance at the Muse concert in LA, I began reading up on Matt Bellamy’s guitar setup and continued my new-found fascination with the band. I’ve sometimes wonder if everything that can be done with the electric guitar is already avaliable. What if found was a bit inspiring.

I have to start with his guitars, as they are amazing pieces of work. Matt Bellamy has his guitars custom built by Hugh Manson of Manson Guitars. At first glance, they appear to be a cross breed of a Les Paul and a Telecaster, with some exaggerated looks. But the extra knobs and controls on the guitars serve various purposes depending on the guitar. The guitar I saw the most at the recent show was The Mirror Manson.

The Mirror Manson was a pretty incredible sight to see under the stage lights for it’s obvious reflective properties, because of how hard it is to look away from it. Combine it with their usual amazing light show and it’s going to be a blinding experience. Haha. The guitar is equipped with a pair of Mississippi Queens pickups from Bare Knuckle. But the really incredible part of this guitar is the MXR Phase 90 Roland GK2 MIDI internal pickup and the Fuzz Factory effects built right in, with the control knobs accessable on the guitar. (Check out how this thing is wired!)

He has multiple versions of these guitars with other features like Kaoss pads and MIDI control sliders buit in for contol over his Whammy pedal and other floor effects. Check out the Muse Wiki site for lots more info.

Here’s an overview video I found on youtube to see more…

Muse was incredible. It’s always great to see a band with such uniqueness and talent have such a draw. The sold out crowd at the Forum was very receptive to the 2 hour set and amazing light/video show the band put on. With the exception of the $40 t-shirts (boo), it was on of the most memorable concert events I’ve seen in a while. Stay tuned for more information on Matt Bellamy, as I’ve become fascinated with his guitar setup and his customized guitars. His rig is like nothing I’ve ever seen…

Your Band Name Is A Keyword

In preparing for this post, I took a second to look for a band that I could be completely unbiased against so as not to offend fans, but to solely use their band name as the focus of the article. In my defense, I’m an average fan of AFI and won’t discuss the music today. But after browsing the Guitar World website, AFI stood out as a great example for 2 good reasons: 1. AFI is a shortened version of the full band name “A Fire Inside”, and the acronym can stand for plenty of other things. 2. As a well established band, I’ve seen countless fan sites, links from record label sites and thousands of backlinks from the most reputable music portals out there. A good band name can really make or break your chances of making it as I mentioned earlier, but for internet marketing’s sake, it can easily bury you. But a deciding factor may be how easily you can rise in search engines under your band name. Try searching AFI in Google, and as of today you will see the following…

Since a newly formed band isn’t going to have a Google music link for quite a while, we’ll have to ignore this for now. But notice the first result in the organic listings. The American Film Institute. Some may argue the domain is an exact match to the search, but we’re dealing with two powerhouse internet entities here. Your still-playing-for-beer band can’t compete. If AFI can’t out rank everyone for their new name, you won’t either. Consider how commonly used the word or words making up your band name are. The more you know about your band name, the more the internet world probably has written about it. Unique combinations of words will help ensure you’re the only credible internet site for that result. For my examples sake, “A Fire Inside” may have been a better choice to promote themselves under, because the direct competition isn’t nearly as strong and has far fewer results. With all of this in mind, remember you are trying to make your music and material as publically accessible as you can. With band marketing today, you can’t afford to be buried in the search engine results when word-of-mouth can be your best ally. If you can’t secure the perfect domain that a screaming fan at a show will remember 100% of the time as mentioned in part one, you’ll need the power of search engines to get them to your site.