Want to go to a place where you can not only get a cool guitar, but also customize it to your liking? Head on over to OD Designs, where one can get guitars, drum sets, and musical AO's to perform your own dream concert, and more.The store itself has a *huge* variety of guitars up for sale, grouped by the name of the maker of their real-life counterparts, as well as the models and color schemes of the instruments.
“There’s no real genre attached to this (store),” store director Leilani Teskat explained, “We have several different musical tastes here. I’m trying to get a Shakira tribute to play here soon, hopefully. Our tributes are open to any of the tribute houses. We offer that to give them added exposure. Plus, we also have the OD Band HUB too. That gives even more exposure, that’s located out on the back porch. We also have OD Live, which is our Live Artists branch of things. We’re partnered with some live performers too, StevenJaimz, Anek, Space Junky, to name a few.”
“So it really is a wide open genre. (laughter) Which I prefer, because it adds to the variety.”
Leilani went on, “Also, we’re partnered with real-life guitar manufacturers ... Ortho makes reproductions in-world of them.” Leilani explained the real-life companies treat the virtual goods more or less as a kind of advertising, “so we provide text shouts when the person wears the guitar. Plus, we have links from the OD website to all of their sites. Plus, I have them followed on Twitter too, and we have them on Myspace and Facebook. So we’ve got the whole web 2.0 network going.” Feedback from the real-live guitar companies has been “very positive. Actually, some of them have been so impressed, they linked our website onto theirs. So we have our pages on theirs. The ones I specifically built myself, so that’s been a real feather in my cap, so to speak. ;-) “
She brought up the website of the BC Rich guitar company, which at the bottom had “Visit BC Rich at” followed by several places online, the one virtual world being Second Life, which was a link to her OD Designs page (http://www.odmusic.info/leilani/bcrich%20webpage.htm). “If you go there, and look at the very bottom, you’ll see the link to SL,” which was a SURL to their store, “That’s the webpage I made for them, and the others too. It’s added promotion for them too, something interesting.”
But the store does more than just sell guitars, it allows one to modify them, “We’ve got (a) custom shop that allows people to customize their OD guitars and basses, even adding their own stickers to their instruments. It’s very cool! ... There’s also a short video on how to do it.” She showed me the shop, which has separate stations for stickers and streamers. A webpage shows two videos on how to operate the booths (http://www.odmusic.info/CustomShop/customshop.html#Custom%20Streamer%20Station). For stickers, one can select from the textures in the station, or use one of your own from your inventory. You can also enlarge or shrink the sticker and choose where on the surface of the guitar front you want it. For streamers, the guitars come with three invisible ones hanging from the headstock. The booth allows you to texture and tinit from one to three. Once again, either one can use a texture of those from the booth or one of your own.When one wears the guitar, one gets a copy of the Heads Up Display to control it with various animations, “you can also adjust the guitar on your av (recommended if you have a tail), then when you have it positioned properly, click the guitar and select ‘Teachfront.’ “
The custom shop has its own HUD as well to help with editing the guitar. Guitars can be copied for one’s inventory, or one can use the store redelivery system for a new copy.
For purchases made at the store, customers are given OD rewards points. “Just like air miles, in a sense,” Leilani explained, “It’s helped out a lot of people who want to do tributes.” In picking the guitar, one may want to pay attention to how it’s color compares to your clothes, “ That's the biggest problem I've found is matching the color up. Sometimes SL can make it kinda disappear. If you have an all black ensemble it gets lost.” The guitars are also highly detailed, down to the strings, made from about 180 to over 250 prims. Most of the guitars come in three sizes, “some of these guitars are so big for my av ... but I want them that big to show off, if I use the Medium sized ones they look good but you can't see the detail.”
Besides guitars, OD Designs also sells drum sets, in different sizes, “the medium ... , the monsters, these are the model most commonly used in Second Life, and the small ... People usually get them depending on which tribute or application they are wanting to do.” Like the guitars, the drums are highly detailed, “we do offer a wearable version of the drums just in case people don't want to use up any prims.” The largest “monster” set is The Titan, “there are a lot of people who just love that particular drum kit ... they also do different things, like the Titan there can spin around and even UFO around.” Like the guitars, drum sets come with their own HUDs for options like different styles of drumming, lights and special effects, and spinning the whole set around drummer and all, “I suggest not doing it in Mouse View.” Sitting on the drums, one gets a copy of the HUD plus the drumsticks.OD Designs also sells keyboards and pianos.
Animations can be remote-controlled, “say you were a live artist playing a guitar, you could have a friend control your animations.” OD Designs sells the H2V vocal HUD, “some do use this vocal HUD along with the guitar playing as some real-life artists sing and play guitar.” And it also has the H2X, a whole-body HUD similar to the one with the guitars, but has many more animations, over fifty, “ think of it as the HUD you get with the guitar is the H2 lite.”
Leilani also pointed out the Redelivery and Help Center, which can get people a fresh copy of their guitars, as well as showing how many reward points they have.
“Someone can come in get a guitar, and be able to do a tribute or performance right away,” Leilani explained, “and we also have a database of people wanting to get into the SL music industry (so to speak) ... the SL Live Music scene is very live and kicking, there are a LOT of live artists, some using SL to promote their own music, and then directing people to their websites to make sales. ... We're trying to help the people get more gigs too because we know that if they're not making the lindens they can't purchase OD Gear. So I'm always looking for ways to help people, and help them step up their performance too. Not just me but the other OD staff. We all help out in customer service.”
The OD Designs website is at http://www.odmusic.info/. The page for the custom shop is at (http://www.odmusic.info/CustomShop/customshop.html#Custom%20Streamer%20Station) and the one for the H2X Full Motion Authentic Guitar Animation HUD / AO at (http://www.odmusic.info/H2x/H2x.htm).
“OD ROCKS!!”
Bixyl Shuftan
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