I thought I’d bring you something a bit different this month. I recently visited Los Angeles – Hollywood to be precise - as a guest of the Yamaha Corporation. Why was I there? Well, the company has just expanded its YGD (Yamaha Guitar Development, the Hollywood based R&D and Custom Shop facility) from 5,000 to 11,000 square feet. The new facility called YASH (Yamaha Artist Services Hollywood) is a state-of-the-art location to deal with Yamaha’s existing artist roster – and to develop new artist relationships and signature products.

The opening ceremony, attended by the cream (is this starting to sound like a press release?) of rock and studio musicians, was hosted by Yoshihiro Doi, the president of Yamaha Corporation of America. A wooden sake barrel was broken open during the ceremony to symbolise ‘a new beginning’ for Yamaha’s Hollywood-based operation. I spent the evening chatting to the likes of guitar whiz Frank Gambale, Queens Of The Stoneage guitarist Try Van Lueewen and Limp Bizkit’s Wes Borland. All thoroughly nice chaps by the way. Oh, and I took loads of pictures.

My guide for the Hollywood trip was Julian Ward, Yamaha-Kemble’s guitar product manager in the UK. In addition to filling me with copious amounts of alcohol and awesome Mexican and Japanese food, Julian took time out to fill me in on the role of YASH. You can read my interview with him below.

Hope you all have a very Merry Christmas - don't forget to drop plenty of hints for more guitar gear...

Ed: Why did Yamaha choose to launch YASH now?

Julian: “The last 3 years have seen us make some big changes to the way we handle artist relations for guitars. The launch of YASH as our flagship global AR office is the result of those changes. YGD has been the home of our US AR but the original set-up was much more an R&D facility so artist work was always a little ‘bolted on.’

In 2004 we took on a full-time Artist Relations Manager for the USA, Mike Tempesta. Mike is able to devote 100% of his time to working with artists so we can be much more responsive and active. The net result of the new approach is guys like Wes Borland, Dave Navarro and Troy Van Leeuwen coming on board - we think it's working well so far. The next stage was to step up our global AR with the appointment of a UK Artist Relations Manager which we did in 2004 with Mark Kirkland, who's brought artists like Brian May, Hard-Fi and Roadstar to Yamaha.”