A new mechanical device has been fitted to guitars to combat the mental blocks their players can easily suffer from during extended improvised solos. In the past this has often resulted in guitarists causing all sorts of problems such as trying to be inventive, relying on inspiration, even cutting solos short by as much as ten minutes. Now these threats have been safely kept at bay with the new whammy bar.

The new bar is ingeniously simple. Essentially it can be used to raise or lower the pitch of the strings in a mechanical manner. Alone this sounds fairly innocuous however when combined with various effects of individually dubious merit, the results can be quite extraordinary. Players are making their guitars scream, growl or even sound like motorbikes. Whichever effect they choose, the important point is that they are now free to continue soloing for a lot longer without fear of running out of great ideas.

So this all sounds great in theory but how does the new 'whammy' play with the all the guitarists out there?

"It's great" said Lee Gato (a guitarist). "Going out of tune all of the time and having every note warble like a distorted cassette recording are small prices to pay for being able to make such beautiful music." He illustrated his point by striking a natural harmonic at the 5th fret of the G string and raising the bar until the string broke.

Of course, not everyone is in favour of these new-fangled devices and there are many who will not use them. It is refreshing to know that some guitarists refuse to take the easy way out and you will still be able to see the hard-nosed, hard-tailed guitarist going whammy-free soloing with nothing to protect them but delay pedals, chorus pedals, overdrive, distortion and a Crybaby wah-wah!

An as yet unnamed rock band has made an amazing discovery and they found it on the 'Dark Side of the Moon.' For years scientists have been wondering what lay there and it seems that this band can now prove it is in fact a mere five notes.

Using these strange five notes, the band has created a scale which it has romantically dubbed the 'pentatonic' scale. This name comes from 'penta' (meaning five) and tonic (meaning some kind of pick-me-up). Asked about their discovery the band were exceptionally humble: "It's like the most obvious scale in the world. Really anyone can play it easily without having to tax themselves too much musically."

Whether this scale will bring prosperity to the band is a difficult matter at the moment as they are currently engaged in an intellectual property case due to many musicians using the so-called 'blues scale' - a transparently obvious rip-off of their 5 note invention. Although the band have made no official comment on this, one member was heard to say "It's such obvious plagiarism of our scale. All these people did was add another note to it and it is isn't even a very good note at that!"