Hilarious Yamaha guitar ads, circa 1992-93
I don’t know who wrote the copy for these Yamaha ads from 1992-93 (which I recently tracked down in some old guitar magazine issues) but they were a marketing genius. These ads are informative and fun, and they lodged themselves in my brain immediately when I saw them as a kid, staying there for the almost 20 years since then.
Observe this brilliant piece for the RGZ (Guitar School, September 1992)
Why You No Buy Tab Books No More?
When I was a little’un, the second greatest thing in the world was getting a new copy of Guitar World and sifting through the tabs. I didn’t know half the songs in it, but that didn’t stop me from trying to learn them. This was pre-YouTube and if a song wasn’t on TV, you had to physically go to a store and purchase it with real actual money by interacting with a real actual human being. If a band didn’t have an Australian deal, you (and by ‘you’ I mean ‘me,’ and by ‘me’ I mean ‘my parents’) had to pay about $50 for an imported CD. Yipes. So in a way, my only way to figure out if I liked a band or not was to play through the transcription of their song in Guitar World. This is how I found out that I liked Megadeth (“Hangar 18″) and Sepultura (“Dead Embryonic Cells” in Guitar World‘s sister magazine, Guitar School), respected ZZ Top (“Doubleback”) and did not care for Bulletboys, not one jot sir (“Talk To Your Daughter,” although I think that was a cover).
Hi! I'm Peter Hodgson. I write for Gibson.com, Australian Guitar, Australian Musician, Mixdown Magazine (including my instructional column, 'Unleash Your Inner Rock God,' which has been running since 2007), Blunt, Beat (including their weekly hard rock/metal column Crunch) and The Brag. And I'm Assistant Social Coordinator with Seymour Duncan.
I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18. I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week), a setup tech, a newspaper editor, and I've also dabbled in radio a little bit. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and my hobbies include drinking way too much coffee, and eating way too much Mexican food.
You can check out my guitar playing at Bandcamp or on YouTube, and feel free to email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com