I will start off with : Brian May of Queen uses a coin as a guitar pick. He thinks plastic picks are too flexible.
What about his guitar? :eek:
While we’re quickly on the subject of picks - Sonny Sharrock liked to keep a bowl of them nearby while he was playing live. He would put some in his mouth, from which he’d grab a new one to replace the one he was currently using, or just spit some back out again.
Neat seeing Tony Levin whipping out the ole Chapman stick, like, back in '84.
The great Allan Holdsworth on snythaxe.
May’s main guitar is a custom model he built himself with his father in the 60s:
Billy Gibbons claims to play using a Mexican Peso from the 1950s. Although he probably has or does at times he also has had deals with companies to make custom picks.
Steve Morse played his Frankenstein telecaster for years. Telecaster body and a strat neck. He redid all the wiring and added a weird collection of pickups. He played it until a signature model was made for him that did everything his old guitar did but better.
Alex Lifeson of Rush invented specialize guitar stands that allow him to switch instruments during certain songs that required it. Especially between acoustic and electric.
Apocryphally, he also used the same concept to build Neil a book stand so he could read while having breakfast.
Lindsey Buckingham also uses a custom made electric guitar for live shows.
Speaking of Frankenstein axes, John Entwistle, on the creation of his “Frankenstein Bass”:
I put this together in San Francisco on a day off part way through a Who tour. It’s the remains of five smashed basses hence the name ‘Frankenstein’…The neck, pickups and circuitry are from a ‘dead’ slab bass, the tailpiece from a Jazz bass, the pickguard from a black P bass and the machine heads from 2 white P basses…Two hours with a Phillips screwdriver and a soldering iron and I was ranting around my hotel room screaming “It’s alive, it’s alive!”
The bass sold at auction in 2003 for £62,400 ($100,000).
Gibbons gets weirder than that: he plays all his guitars strung with .007s; guitar strings as fine as hair.
Rick Neilson of Cheap Trick has a bevy of guitars; in concert, he plays a different one for each song. Most unusual is his five-necked guitar. There are others that stand out.
ZZ Top had their rotating guitars. Neilson was working on the same concept when they started using them, so he made the five-necked one instead.
Willie Nelson has an acoustic guitar that is so old he put another hole in it above the sound hole.
Bo Diddley had a rectangular guitar.
Ace Frehley outfitted a couple of his Les Pauls with smoke bombs and fireworks to fire off during his solos.
I can’t even explain what Roy “Future Man” Wooten plays with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, but I’ll try. He calls it a SynthAxe Drumitar. The SynthAxe is apparently a guitar shaped MIDI synthesizer (of which only 100 were ever made), which he modified into some sort of drum machine and uses it mainly as a percussion instrument.
Aside from the Manson double-neck acoustic (with a mandolin neck thrown in, on top, for chuckles) John Paul Jones also has a triple-neck mandolin with an acoustic bass on the bottom of the instrument.
Wouldn’t mind seeing that second gizmo.
Never heard of a SynthAxe before. So, kind of the polar opposite of a Keytar?
That’s why I brought it up. I thought that way more interesting than his using a coin as a pick. Who else built their own electric guitar that they then used for an entire rock-n-roll career? Eddie Van Halen is famous for his frankenguitar, but that was made by someone else and then modified by him.
Brian and his dad made the entire guitar, including the body, the neck and the tremolo system. About the only thing they didn’t make was the pickups, but they did modify them.
Nigel Tufnel would play his guitar solos using a violin–not a violin bow, but a violin–and would stop in mid-solo to tune the violin. 
Jaco Pastorius played the Bass of Doom a Fender Jazz Bass that he turned into a fretless bass by pulling out the frets and filling them in with resin, he had a truly beautiful tone.
There is Pat Metheny’s 42 string “guitar.” I’ve been keeping my out for one, but no guitar shop seems to stock them.
Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath originally used banjo strings on his guitar, as he’d lost two fingertips on his right hand in a work accident as a teenager and the lighter strings were less painful to play.