View From The New Year Bar

Happy New Year to you all, and a belated welcome to the new and improved Alloutguitar.com! Regular visitors to Alloutguitar.com will notice a whole load of changes - and all of them hopefully for the better... as ever, let us know what you think.

So what's new? Well, we've streamlined the whole magazine to make sure that it's more intuitive, user friendly and over the next few months we will be steadily introducing new levels of interactivity throughout the site.

The forum is back and we will be introducing our own social network section on the site very soon. As for the new design, we reckon it also looks a lot cooler as well! What do you think?

We are proud to welcome some of the world's leading music schools: Academy of Contemporary Music (ACM), Guitar-X, and the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP) - as well as the international exam body ‘Rockschool' - who alongside our top team of internationally renowned guitarists and contributors will give you an unbeatable blend of up to the minute news, features, reviews and vital information on all things guitar related. The site is now updated with the latest news and reviews on a continual basis and we have another first with our daily 'Elevenses' mini interview feature: at 11 a.m. G.M.T. every day we will publish an exclusive interview with guitarists/industry figures spanning every genre - so make sure you check in daily to get your latest guitar fix!

Over the next few weeks you will notice some new dedicated sections concentrating on specific music styles - Jazz and Fusion; Rock and Metal; Classic Rock and Blues; Pop, Funk and R'n'B; Classical and Acoustic; Indie; and Country - truly AOG has something for everyone! So, if you don't want your latest Johnny Marr news to one of Yngwie's latest escapades, pop along to whatever section is your favored music style and you will be sorted! ..

In mid January AOG and our business partners will announce a new international event that I know every one of you will be very excited about...I can't comment further yet!

Following the success of the third Allout Guitarfest back in September 2007 (featuring such players as Jamiroquai's Rob Harris, ex Whitesnake guitar slinger Bernie Marsden and guitar phenomenon Guthrie Govan) AOG will be staging a series of festivals throughout the UK in 2008. This is part of our commitment to not ‘just' be a magazine, but something real and tangible. Let me know if you wish to stage a similar event where you live and we can work with you - we can really invigorate the guitar scene!

Finally, let me know what you think of the new AOG in general: who we should interview, what events we should cover - and any ideas for general features and lessons that you think we should be looking at are always valued. Remember that we are in existence to provide you with the most complete and entertaining online guitar magazine in existence: drop me a line at owen@alloutguitar.com and I shall pass it on to our worldwide team - we will also be introducing a Letters/E-mails page - and for ‘E-mail/Letter of the Month' we'll dig something cool out of the AOG cupboard as a prize.

Until next time...mine's a Stella!

Owen Edwards

Editor