Apparently no one told Logitech that we are in a recession. The Logitech Wireless Guitar Controller and Wireless Drum Controller for Nintendo’s Wii are licensed for use with Guitar Hero and way overpriced. The axe sports a maple neck, rosewood fingerboard and metal frets. They even threw in a “noise dampening strum bar and fret buttons,” and a touch-sensitive slider on the fretboard.

The drums provide 3 drum pads and a pair of cymbals, along with the stainless steel kick pedal. A Wiimote slides into each, ruining the illusion.

If you’re in the market for a fake guitar that costs more than some real guitars, than this is your lucky day. Mad Catz has started to ship this Rock Band Wireless Wooden Fender Stratocaster. It’s a 1:1 replica of the axe that is constructed from genuine Stratocaster wooden blanks.

Fake guitar aficionados will have plenty to love. Even the tuning keys and bridge are built from genuine Fender metal parts and fittings. It also sports a wireless module that will work with Microsoft’s Xbox 360. For your $299.99 you also get a Fender guitar strap and a headset socket for online play.

OpenChord has designed a system that allows an actual real guitar to sync up with your Nintendo Wii to play Guitar Hero. Just plug the Wiimote into the guitar and use real strings and frets instead of plastic buttons. There is one hitch and it’s a big one.

Guitar Hero wasn’t designed for use with six strings and 22 to 24 frets. Which kinda blows the whole thing out of the water. Too bad. Playing GH with a real guitar sounds like a nightmare. Who would have thought? Check out a video below.

What do you get when you combine a guitar, a synthesizer and lasers? No, not a Pink Floyd concert. The Prism, which is a laser synth-guitar. The Prism is pretty unique in the world of of laser guitars and includes aspects of a Theremin and a laser harp for some really cool sounds.

The Prism features a voltage controlled oscillator and uses four laser beams as strings. It can apparently be played without the need for any programming. It’s designed to be attached to a regular guitar amp, with no computer needed. Check out a demo below.

Looks like Guitar Hero 5 has a new axe for you to grind. This baby features a new white pick guard with a red paintjob for the body. Internal signaling is now digital to minimize latency and the strum bar has been tweaked for the sake of reliability.

You’ll also notice colored dots on the neck for ease of use and slight reliefs on the top, middle, and bottom fret buttons. You can pick one up with your copy of Guitar Hero this September.

Back in 2007, I went to E3 for the first time. 2007 happened to be the first year of the much smaller E3 show and it sucked so badly I never went back. E3 is going back to the massive show that gamers loved for so many years for 2009 and new games and products galore should be unveiled at the show.

One of the products debuting at E3 will be the You Rock Guitar. Right now, all we have are a few details, exactly what the guitar looks like won’t be known until E3 kicks off and the product is unveiled. What we do know is that the guitar will work for all major consoles and can connect to a PC as well.

This guitar caught my eye right away. As far as guitar mods go, it’s pretty darn crazy. Crazier then the Atari-Hero. What kind of mind combines a Speak n’ Spell with a Rock Band guitar? This guy in the video below, that’s who.

It’s called the Speak n’ Spellbinder. The sounds from the Speak ‘n Spell are all mapped to the frets, strum button and even the whammy bar. In the video below, modder Aj Gannon never really loses his cool and starts rocking hardcore, much to our disappointment. If you can even rock out to such noise.

The problem with Guitar Hero and Rock Band is that people think they can actually play guitar. By people, I mean you. The Zivix Headliner is a real guitar that works with both games using special fingertip sensors. What this means for you?

Well, if you use this you may actually learn to play the guitar for real. Seriously, it has strings and everything, because you’re a big boy now. There’s no official release date for the Headliner yet, but they hope to have the guitar on store shelves sometime later this year.

You want to be a Guitar Hero, but you don’t know any songs. Just attach this Maestro device onto your guitar, load a music file of the song you want to learn and it will point out the frets you need to hit, using lasers. As any rock god will tell you, guitars and lasers are an awesome combination.

But just be warned, if you suck, no amount of lasers are going to stop you from sucking. You still have to strum and finger the frets. But it does seem like a great way for guitar players to learn songs quickly. If this concept ever gets made, it would probably do really well.

The Steampunk phenomenon just keeps chugging along. Here’s a little something for you Guitar Hero players who wish they featured a Victorian rocker with period guitar. This is what such a guitar might look like. It was built for the 2008 Jersey City Artists Studio Tour by Mark Dalzell, and it’s called Organum Insolitus.

It features a television with Fresnel lens magnifier, onboard phaser, an amplifier and uses clockwork gears, hand hammered brass, cloth wire and wood. The guitar can be attached to an external amp with a standard ¼-inch cable, so you can really use this.

Imagine how many times great musicians have lost masterpieces just because they didn’t have a way to document it. That’s where the iDea guitar from Ovation comes in. It’s the first guitar to feature a built-in MP3 player for just such occasions. There isn’t much info on specs, but it probably has a decent amount of flash storage so you can record anything on a whim. It features a control panel on the side with an LCD display, mic input and a USB connection. It also has an easy to use 4-way controller for menu navigation. If that’s not enough, you get a set of basic EQ sliders for the bass, mid and treb.

It will let you record the guitar, mic or anything else that’s connected to the aux in jack. You can even mix those features together or use the pitch-stable variable speed playback option to slow things down for practice.

By now you must have a zillion fake plastic instruments taking up room in your home, thanks to the endless Guitar Hero type games that have entered your life. You might want to check out the Korean-made Funny Band, which takes a guitar and shoves drums on the back and a keyboard on the front for some reason.

I have no idea how you’re supposed to use this thing, but I’m dubbing it The all-in-one, one-man-nerd-band plastic-ono experience. If you think this weird mash-up lives up to it’s name, you’ll get a kick out of reading the press release below where we learn that Funny Band “will be loved by dance game to lots of users who just fall in to rhythm game.” and that “there was no game like performing on on-line such as funny band.”

If you have a kid learning the guitar chances are your ears could use a break. You’ll want to invest in this Yamaha Silent Nylon String Guitar. Plugging in a pair of headphones lets you practice at your own pace without annoying everyone around you.

You can also connect a CD player into the guitar itself so you can play along directly with the music, despite the fact that CDs are pretty much obsolete. Why they didn’t just build an mp3 player in it is anyone’s guess. Still, it’s a nifty instrument to have around. Especially fo those living in small apartments. The Yamaha Silent Nylon String Guitar will retail for a hefty $499.99. But silence is golden.

Here’s something for those who like to paint their faces while playing Rock Band and Guitar Hero, after a healthy argument over the merits of belonging to the KISS army. Even if you aren’t a KISS fan, this is a badass Rock Band and Guitar Hero compatible replica of Gene Simmons’ signature bass. It also features a bi-directional strum bar, ultra-responsive fret buttons, an analog whammy bar for $80. It will be released on Halloween. Demon boots and outlandishly long tongue clip-on not included.

File this one under “Things that do not rock!” The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has recalled all the 57,000 $55 Rage Wireless Guitars that have thus far been sold. The reason? They were made in China of course.

Apparently a circuit board defect can cause the AA batteries included to leak acid if they are installed incorrectly. (People actually install batteries incorrectly?) What it means is that the acid may burn consumers flesh and transform ordinary plain rock into Acid Rock. And that is just unacceptable. I’ll tell you what else is unacceptable. Chemical burns to the groin. Everyone stop rocking immediately. Guitars are dropping, I mean leaking acid!