Fire Breathing Dragon Guitars

I was a kid during the lion share of the Glam Rock period. Still, the imprint was there when I first started playing guitar in the mid 1980’s.

So, despite possibly being seen as a throwback, when I came up with the fire breathing dragon guitar idea, I thought everyone would view the guitar as incredibly cool, fashion be damned. Below is a rough I drew up, I think maybe the wing could maybe be bigger and have a third webbing and a fourth ‘finger’. The base of the wing is supposed to lift a few inches off the guitar before going up – so I can easily play it.

But if you’re going to have one dragon guitar in a band, you might as well make the rhythm, lead and bass guitars into fire breathing dragons. Right away we come up with my first problem. You see basses are bigger than guitars. The low pitch of the bass demands this extra length. So if we were to have a bassist-guitarist dragon fight, it would look like the bass would win.

Fine, maybe the guitarist could solo so impressively and thus ‘win musically’ over the bassist. It’s true that most bassists won’t solo. I only know of two songs (Does it Really Happen? by Yes and Play With Me by Bootsauce), that have bass solos that could compete with the usual guitar solos of a song. But here again, I’m beat because I’m a rhythm guitarist. I know all sorts of chords and techniques to use them, as well as some impressive intros and repetitive lead lines. But, alas, I’m not very good at soloing.

It would never do to have a bassist or a guitar soloist beat me, the creator of the fire breathing dragon guitar. But all of this battling may be a moot point.

As you might be able to tell from the drawing, the dragon guitar is kind of one sided. In other words, with the usual right handed guitarists, battles couldn’t really be fought. There are left handed guitarists but they are rare. I have two left handed brothers and both play guitar right handed.

So any battles taking place on stage, would be three fire breathing dragon guitars attacking one poor stationary drummer from the one side. That’s not nearly as exciting as I had envisioned at the outset. Fire breathing dragon guitar idea may you rest in peace.