Today's Top Stories:

  Fender Mourns Passing of William "Bill" Schultz
Nobody has had more to do with the return to glory of Fender Musical Instruments than William "Bill" Schultz, who led an employee leveraged buyout of Fender from the previous owner, broadcast giant CBS. Last week, Schultz peacefully passed away at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona at the age of 80, following a lengthy battle with cancer. From a historical perspective, only one person had a higher profile in Fender history than Schultz, and that was Leo Fender. In 1965, broadcast giant CBS bought out Fender guitars for a record $13 million, and though the instruments being built maintained their standard of quality through the '60s and into the '70s, it eventually became clear that CBS did not fully understand the guitar market and made a number of ill-advised moves that led to a steady decline in quality. Twenty years later, Schultz and his team set out to restore the company's reputation and once again build some of the finest instruments in the world. With Schultz at the helm as Chairman of the Board for Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, the company eventually built and maintained state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in two countries and offices around the world.

  Influential Guitarist, Etta Baker, Dies at Age 93
Etta Baker worked for 26 years at a textile mill in Morganton, NC before quitting to pursue a career as a professional musician. She went on to record with many legendary performers such as Taj Mahal, influenced Bob Dylan, was awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts and received the Folk Heritage Award from the North Carolina Arts Council. Sadly, Baker has passed away at the age of 93. There was no official cause of death given, though her health had reportedly been failing for a number of years. Baker played both six and 12-string guitar and the banjo and made her first mark in the music industry in 1956, when she appeared on a compilation album called "Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians." This recording greatly influenced the growing folk revival of the times.

  Cycling '74 Adds a Bundle of Updates
The San Francisco-based music software company, Cycling '74, announced the release of Max/MSP version 4.6 and Jitter version 1.6, which add Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs running OS X 10.4 or later. Max is a graphical programming environment for music and media applications that allows users to trigger events with millisecond accuracy, create complex mappings for incoming data, and run a large number of operations in parallel. MSP extends Max's capabilities by incorporating audio objects that are connected like audio patches, where signals flow from one object to the next. Jitter is a collection of video, matrix, and 3D graphics objects for Max. Cycling '74 has also updated the Mac OS X versions of Pluggo to v3.6, Mode to v1.3 and Hipno to v1.1. All now feature Intel-Mac (Universal Binary) support.

  New in Stock at Sweetwater

• Squier Bullet Special - A Fender guitar for under $100? Yes, it's true! The beautiful, Ice Blue Metallic Bullet Special guitar was designed by Fender as a "no nonsense" guitar in their economical Squier line. Sporting one hot humbucker pickup, chrome hardware, one volume knob and a black pickguard, this limited edition Bullet also features a bolt-on maple neck with a rosewood fingerboard, 21 medium frets and a hardtail bridge. The curvaceous body is unmistakably based on the timeless Stratocaster and is the perfect guitar for those who want to start off with an instrument that has a proven track record of success. Each guitar in the Squier line was designed by Fender, but manufactured overseas to keep the costs down, but quality surprisingly high!
• Apple iPod 30GB - Available in either black or white, the 30GB iPod lets you watch the music video of your favorite artist while you're waiting on line to buy tickets to the concert! It can carry up to 100 hours of video wherever you go and can be connected to any TV at will. Pros can use an iPod to transfer DAW tracks to and from any studio on the planet! This new iPod features a staggering 20 hours of battery life for music, 6.5 hours for video (and longer if you reduce the brightness) and boasts a 60% brighter display. Talk about ruining the week for all the iPod's "competitors!"

  Guitar of the Day
If ever a guitar typified the glorious excesses of the 1950s, the Gretsch White Falcon is it. To quote the Gretsch literature of the day, the Falcon was "the most beautiful guitar in the world!" A hellishly expensive dreamboat even when new, White Falcons continue to be highly treasured, collector's items with astronomical price tags. But for all the things the 6136 White Falcon was, it was not intended to be a production model at all, but rather a trade show guitar - a "dream machine" that Gretsch put together just to show off a little in 1954. But once orders began pouring in, the Falcon was rushed into production and now the Gretsch copy read, "the utmost in striking beauty, luxurious styling, and peak tonal performance." But don't get blinded by the glitter and gold! Rich, complex tones pour from the dual DynaSonic pickups thanks to a 17" wide, 2 3/4" deep laminated maple body with an arched laminated maple top. The White Falcon neck is three-piece maple with a 25.5" scale and an ebony fretboard. For greater expressive control, the White Falcon boasts three separate volume controls (neck pickup, bridge pickup, master volume), and a three-position master tone switch. This gives you the ability to blend the volume and tone of the pickups to create your own unique sound. Along with gold hardware and multiple binding, other artistic touches on the White Falcon include Mother-of-Pearl inlay position markers with feather engraving and a gold-plated Gretsch "G" Cadillac tail piece. Of course it ships in a plush-lined deluxe hardshell case.