The Sound Issue 2016 Product Focus: Dyskin RalBar

It's traditionally been a long journey from fumbling through your first G-chord to playing a flaming Fender with your teeth. It's generally accepted that mastering a skill takes somewhere in the region of 10,000 plus hours, or around six to ten years depending on how much spare time you've got. Australian guitarist and dentist Brian Dyskin has designed an elegant solution to streamline that process. He calls it the Dyskin RalBar. It combines a teardrop/paisley shape with an internationally patented combination of fret layout and markings that allow complete beginners to play with just one finger across the fretboard. Add in the Roman numeral markings across the fretboard edge, so new musicians don't need to know chord names or shapes, it's like "painting-by-numbers" for guitar.

The fret layout even autocorrects so a wrong note will automatically play as the next correct note in the scale. That means just about any combination of chords played on the RalBar will work musically with any combination of melody notes played on it.

Because the RalBar is constructed like a high end electric guitar - solid tonewood body, maple or mahogany neck and Dyskin designed single coil pickups - you can even use all the usual tricks that add to musical expression with guitars, like bending notes, muting and hammering on and off.