Levy’s Hendrix Lyrics straps are available in six designs.

Levy’s Leathers Jimi Hendrix lyrics guitar straps are inspired by the style of the legendary guitarist and use his images and handwritten song lyrics exclusively licensed from Authentic Hendrix. Each sublimation-printed polyester strap has an original design, song title, and handwritten lyric excerpt on the front, with the full song lyrics printed on the back. Learn more at www.levysleathers.com.

Manzarek became one of the most influential keyboardists in rock and later was a best-selling author and Grammy-nominated recording artist in his own right. His most-recent album, 2011’s Translucent Blues, was a collaboration with slide guitarist Roy Rogers.

Scott Tennant

Classical guitarist Scott Tennant will stage a performance using seven guitars owned and played by the Romero family, June 1 at showroom of Guitar Salon, Santa Monica, California.

The guitars – an 1886 Torres, 1970 Miguel Rodriguez reverse-fan, 1919 Santos Hernandez, 1958 Miguel Rodriguez flamenco, 1969 Hermann Hauser, the 1973 Miguel Rodriguez churchdoor known as “La Wonderful,” a 2001 Blochinger, and a guitar by Antonio de Torres, the famed 19th-century builder – will be brought to the venue by Pepe Romero, Jr., a renowned maker who continues the family’s guitar tradition. He will introduce each instrument and provide background, technical, and historical information before handing it off to Tennant. Learn more at guitarsalon.com.

Photo: Andrew Stuart.

An event dubbed The Jeff Hanneman Memorial Celebration will take place May 23 at the Hollywood Palladium, in Los Angeles. It will be free and open to the public.

Hanneman, who passed away May 2 at the age of 49, co-founded Slayer with fellow guitarist Kerry King, bassist Tom Araya, and drummer Dave Lombardo in 1981. He stayed out of the spotlight, rarely did interviews, and when not on tour essentially went “incommunicado” so he could spend time with his wife and family; they were also the reason Slayer would not tour into late December, as Christmas was his favorite holiday.

Hanneman helped shape Slayer’s sound – and the thrash genre – through his songs, including ”Angel of Death,” “Raining Blood,” “South of Heaven” and “War Ensemble.”  For more, visit www.slayer.net.

The Les Paul Foundation supports Guitars For Vets, a program headquartered in Milwaukee, by providing funding so Guitars for Vets can purchase guitars requested by veterans who graduate from the program. Throughout his life, Les Paul was interested in music education, engineering, and medical research. For more, visit guitars4vets.org and lespaulfoundation.org.

The J.C. Harper Buck Dharma with optional Kronos fingerboard inlays.

J.C. Harper’s 40th Anniversary Buck Dharma signature guitar has an alder body with a forearm bevel and “tummy cut.” It has a maple neck, walnut fingerboard, mother-of-pearl dot inlays, a 25½” scale length, 24 stainless-steel frets, 16″ fingerboard radius, 1 11/16″ bone nut, a custom BOC Kronos inlay on the headstock, and Dharma’s signature on headstock. It uses two DiMarzio humbuckers, Sperzel Trim-Lok tuners, a HipShot fixed bridge, and its finish is white with optional album-cover graphics. Learn more at jchluthier.com.

“I thought, ‘This is a mechanical-design challenge,’” Jaggers said. “So I thought [it] might be a great project.”

The students, A.J. Fenton, Eric Stone, Lisa Sampson, Nicki Chamberlain-Simon, and Amber Wang, took four months to design and build a series of prototypes that flatten the capo, sweeping the mechanical elements back and out of the way of the fretting fingers while retaining the qualities of better commercial capos including speed of placement and the ability to clip it to the headstock when not in use.

Few think about the problems the guitar poses for a capo maker. The device acts as the barre, taking the place of the index finger that spans the neck in a barre chord and depressing the strings just enough to create solid contact with the frets but not so much as to throw the tones off-pitch. That lets a player change the key of a song to match one’s vocal range without changing the basic chord shapes.

The capo also has to be forgiving enough to accommodate a variety of guitar necks, which not only change from guitar to guitar, but also along the neck of a single guitar. Finally, it had better not dig into the woodwork.

“Most people figure out how to make do and curse a little bit while they play, but it’s pretty awkward,” Jaggers added.

“There are a lot of nuances we didn’t think about before we started, like the curvature of the guitar neck or the materials we had available,” Wang said. “Every part of the prototype, we had to make ourselves. So we had to be creative.”

The students’ final prototype has a two-piece, spring-loaded plastic framework created on a 3-D printer with a hard-rubber strip that contacts and gently clamps the strings. While it’s not yet perfect – the capo has to be placed just so – the team feels they’ve come a long way in four months toward the guitarists’ goal.

They expect the capo project will continue next year, perhaps with a new team of students to work with advisers Ann Saterbak, a professor in the practice of engineering education, and Matthew Wettergreen, a lecturer in engineering.

Nick Lowe and Kim Richey

Nick Lowe has confirmed a string of solo acoustic headlining tour dates starting late this summer. The tour will kick off in Philadelphia August 8 and cover the northeast. On all but two dates, fellow Yep Roc recording artist, Kim Richey will join Lowe as an opener. Richey is a two-time Grammy-nominated Nashville-based singer/songwriter who made her Yep Roc Records label debut in April with the release of her seventh studio album, Thorn In My Heart.

Siegal is midway through a solo tour of the U.K., Holland and Belgium. He also played six European shows with his band, The Mississippi Mudbloods, culminating May 8 in London. Siegal has won British Blues Awards for Band (2010), Male Vocalist (’11 and ’12), Acoustic Artist (’12).