The Ski Channel presents the Top 10 Ski Guitars

We at The Ski Channel are into music. Lets just say that we are super dee duper into music. In our offices there are no less than 50 incredible guitars…Strats, Tele’s, Vox’s, a Buck Owens, a 1960 National Westwood, a Ferrington Baritone... We have a recording studio and we make our own music. We are also big fans of Surf Music. But, we are very jealous that surfing has a sound - The Ventures, The Beach Boys, Dick Dale! There is a quantifiable sonic backdrop that states its purpose in the first bar – sun and fun! Surf music also has specific goto instruments. The Fender single coil guitars to start make up an overwhelming amount of surf sound. Strats, Mustangs, Jazzmasters and Jaguars were and are everywhere in surf. There were some Tele’s out there as well. Other brands like Danelectro and Teisco could be found in the surf world and then there was of course the legendary Mosrites, which were played by everyone in the surf world.

It is one of our main goals at The Ski Channel to create a sonic landscape for skiing and we have some big announcements coming up. We would be lying if we could tell you what the hell that is right now, because it hasn’t been built yet. There is no “ski sound” like in the surf world. Ironically, artists like Jack Johnson have almost created a second surf sound before we even have our first. The greatest skier/guitar player is legendary pop star John Oates. The guitar slinger who has lived in Aspen for 25 years is one the world’s best telemark skiers and obviously a beast on the guitar as well as one of the most successful pop artists of all time with his band Hall and Oates.

Ski racer Bryon Friedman is nothing short of a genius songwriter and you will likely be hearing him on the radio soon. You will certainly see him on our air, as we have a show coming out on Bryon and his music. Seal is an avid snowboarder. The band The Fray grew up on the slopes. These are skiers and riders who play pop songs as opposed to skiers and riders who play ski songs. We need a damn ski sound! And, again that is going to be a huge goal of ours.

If you are at all a fan of The Ski Channel, you will know that we love lists. We make them all the time. Top ski towns for singles. Top 100 gnarliest runs. Our top 250 most influential people in snowsports took nearly 2000 hours to complete. Our resort rater is made up of hundreds of lists. So to feed our appetite for list making and to hopefully create an understanding of what tools should go in the tool chest for creating the ski sound, we are making a list of the top 10 ski guitars.

Obviously, this was more of an art project than a science project, but we factored in a lot of variables. We traced roots of luthiers. We called music stores and pawnshops in markets with high skier density like Denver and Salt Lake. We went through famous skiers and musicians and charted the guitars they play. We went through the history of a lot of instruments to find some origin ties. If we were a betting man, our initial thoughts are that the sound lies somewhere in between a Strat and a White Falcon. It is likely playing through a twin reverb, a bandmaster or a Princeton on a fairly clean setting or something creamy.

And after all that…Tah Dah – The Ski Channel Top 10 Ski Guitars