Hey, has anyone checked out the super-cool “Body Builder” section over at Warmoth Custom Guitar Parts? It’s an incredibly fun interface that lets you select a guitar body and add all the appointments. Your dreams become reality before you very eyes.
Which is all well and good — unless you have really bad dreams!
Which brings us to the latest Tonefiend contest. Mind you, it’s not much of a contest, but that’s cool — it’s not not much of a prize either.
The “rules”:
1. Create a guitar body image using the Warmoth Body Builder (or other online guitar visualization tool)
2. Take a screen shot and post it to comments below.
3. Whoever creates the weirdest/funniest/ugliest image wins a weird/funny/ugly stompbox. Enter as many times as you can stand like!
No voting this time — I pick the winner, to be announced next Monday, the 21st. Runners-up will be enshrined here in a “Hall of Shame” slideshow.
Note #1: Not all of Warmoth’s body types feature the realtime animation function — you’ll probably get the best results with Teles, Strats, and Jazzmasters.
Note #2: This is in no way a put-down of Warmoth. I love their stuff, and I truly dig the Body Builder — what a fun way to conceive a guitar! It’s just one of those tools that’s impossible not to abuse.
You know — like guitars in general. 
UPDATE: Reader AiXeLsyD13 shared this link to a list of online virtual guitar builders. I hereby declare these tools — none of which I’ve tried — fair game. In other words, you may use any online guitar-visualizer tool — but no cheating with Photoshop or other image-editing software. And photos from life are definitely off limits, because I’ll never sleep again if I find out that some of these things are actually out there…waiting.
Also: The Warmoth builder can be a little funky. Sometimes it skips past some hardware steps (i.e., the all-important woefully mismatched knobs). Sometimes the selected pickups don’t appear through the pickguard. You just have to fiddle around till you get something, um, memorable.
That’s it for now. I’ll be back later after I finish clawing my eyes out.
ANOTHER UPDATE: The good-natured folks at Warmoth have posted a few of these on their Facebook page. Warmoth’s Eric Wylie definitely got into the spirit of the project: “We know customers spend a lot of time on the builders coming up with crazy ideas,” he writes. “I suspect our own staff has spent plenty of time dreaming up the hideous….”
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