I would like to share a recent article with you form the Orange Amps website. Seems that Orange Amplifiers are so popular that someone felt they needed 141 of them.

From the orange Amps Website : Thieves broke into Orange HQ at Borehamwood on Saturday night (16th August) and stole. 141 Tiny Terror combos with a total retail value of £62,000. . So far, 121 Tiny Terror combos have been legitimately shipped into the UK and . 2 pieces to Hungary, no others have been shipped anywhere in Europe. If you are offered a Tiny Terror combo or hear of somebody else who is,. please contact info@omec.com to help us and the police with investigations.. .. There will be a £3000 reward for information which results in the successful. Conviction of the criminals who carried out this theft.

I would like to encourage everyone to be alert and if you have any information, please report it to info@omec.com . Orange Amplifiers is a company that gets a fair amount of mention in the GuitarGearHeads.com forum, and I believe it is our duty to help in any way we can. This is not about the reward, but rather about being supportive and doing the right thing for a company that is dedicated to building great products for us guitar players.

Here is a link to a complete list of Serial Numbers on the stolen amplifiers. http://www.orangeamps.com/news.asp?ID=34

Gary Allen

Trends in musical instruments are not uncommon today. Usually they start out pretty slow when one company incorporates a new idea, and then other companies slowly follow making small changes, thus the evolution of a new product begins. At the NAMM show in Anaheim 2008, a new trend seemed to be developing, and the interesting part is how fast this one seems to be moving. Companies that have built their name in solely acoustic guitars have begun to move into the solid body electric guitar realm.

The most marketed and well known of these is the new Taylor solid body guitar. I knew of this guitar well before the NAMM show, but as I visited other high end acoustic guitar builders, I saw two more companies that introduced solid body electrics for the first time. Both Wechter Guitars and Larrivee Guitars were showing these new guitars, and to my amazement, these guitars were high end, well built, and thought out.

The other interesting part of this event is the fact that these are not cheap copies of guitars already on the market. I did not get a chance to check out the Larivee guitar as long as I would liked to, but both the Taylor models and the Wechter models have incorporated brand new proprietary pickups as well as unique body shapes styles for comfort in playing.

At this point, I believe that this is a valuable trend based on the fact that these companies are pushing the limits of electric guitar technology, which I believe for the most part has been a little stagnant for awhile with the exception of a few electric guitar manufacturers. It will be exciting to continue to see how this plays out, and if a primarily acoustic guitar manufacturer will be able to make inroads into a market that has been dominated by large companies like Fender and Gibson for so many years.