Guitar Geek had such awesome diagrams of famous guitarist guitar rigs. As a teenager, I was totally obsessed with reading through each rig just imagining that I had the gear detailed in the diagrams. Carefully working on my own diagram of my dream rig and costing it out to see what I might be able to afford with my pocket money.
The community on the Guitar Geek platform was great, one of the more informative communities on the internet in regard to guitar equipment.
Sadly, the Guitar Geek website was closed down several years ago now and to be honest I haven’t really found anything quite like it ever since.
There was something great about the diagrams, they were not just stock product images which are a bit soulless. Instead, each diagram had character, you could connect with them as clearly the individuals making them really cared about the research and designs that they were putting out there. And man there was good research going into the rigs, with detailed overviews of each pedalboard and individual pedals used. Overall, we miss Guitar Geek – it was a great resource, community and a place to get lost in your own pedalboard dreamworld. We were so sad to see it go as a website.
The question still remains, whatever happened to Guitar Geek. There are plenty of rumours out there on the internet, for example, thegearpage.net forum member Somedude posted that Guitar Geek was “sold to another forum that tried to merge the databases, ran poorly and collapsed” (thegearpage.net/board/) while harmonycentral.com forum member TomCTC posted that “the dude stopped doing them for free and instead getspaid now by Guitar World to do one a month on the last page of their mag” (harmonycentral.com/forums/).
However, a former Guitar Geek who “hung out on the forums for years” kindly got in touch with me to provide a more accurate account of what happened to Guitar Geek. His account is as follows:
“Guitargeek was run by Adam Cooper (of the band Allison’s Halo). While he tried several times, he never really managed to monetize the site in any way. The exceptions being the rigs he drew for Guitar World. Pinterest stealing every picture on the internet without credit didn’t help.”
As time moved on, changes in Adam’s life meant that Guitar Geek was put on the backburner and slowly the website “hadn’t really been (updated) much for a while. I think when Guitar.com offered to buy the content, he took it as a way out. Basically, he quit because he had enough going on. I think the twitter was sold at the same time as the rest of the site. It’s sad. I honestly think it had something to do with keeping dream pop/shoegaze alive into the 21st century.”
At present the website guitargeek.com simply redirects to vanderbilly’s YouTube page and there is still an active (though not updated since 2017 at the time of writing) Twitter page (twitter.com/guitargeek_com), so who knows maybe one day it will rise again!
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Guitar Geek wasn’t just a rig database — it was a genuinely obsessive, characterful corner of the guitar internet.