For every really cool guitar, there is one that should have never got past the design stage. Whether it’s cartoonish artwork, a giant foot or something just plain weird, the world of guitars is responsible for some true howlers. This is a collection of five of those guitars that any guitarist conscious about their image should avoid like the plague.

Parker Fly Deluxe

This guitar, whilst looking relatively normal, has a very strange body design and an inexplicably thin headstock. The body of the guitar looks like a person unenthusiastically waving their arms, which doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence for the music that would come out of it. The thin headstock is particularly unusual, trying a little too hard to fit in with the body design. Overall, it is anything but fly, and the colour options include green-tinted silver and a nauseating “antique” gold.

ES-86

The ES-86, made by ES guitars, essentially looks like what would happen if you got a giant to take bites out of a flying V. You could argue that the electric guitar is jagged, because it certainly does have points, but those points are linked by soft curves. This gives a very unsettling appearance: on one hand, it’s a jagged flying V, but it’s undermined by the gentle inwards curves and the bulky look of the body.

Ed Roman Quicksilver Shark Guitar

On first hearing “shark guitar,”  your mind will have undoubtedly jumped to a cool guitar with a shark design elegantly built in to the body. Unfortunately the reality isn’t quite as good. The Quicksilver Shark guitar looks like somebody got an ordinary guitar and then wedged a poorly animated foam shark over it. The shark is clearly supposed to be eating the guitar, but that would quickly be forgotten if you watched somebody playing it. You have a guitar that’s twice the size of any normal guitar, and all you get in return is a cartoonish picture of a shark.

Big Foot Guitar

This guitar’s de facto name says it all. It is literally a big foot, which looks like it might be from the mythical Bigfoot. The majority of the guitar hardware is on the hairy, upper portion of the foot, and then five large toes point off at the bottom. It’s cool to design guitars that look like interesting things, but what you essentially have here is a playable foot. Feet aren’t exactly the best thing to model a musical instrument on.

Surfboard Guitar

A Japanese guitarist named Masayoshi Takanaka is famed internet-wide for playing a surfboard guitar. It’s a surfboard with an oval hole cut out of it. Inside this hole is the guitar’s neck, and the guitar’s hardware is built onto the middle of the board. Not only is this a massively impractical instrument, it looks anything but cool. Surfboards are cool on and around the beach, where there is the possibility of actually surfing. On a stage, when you are making music, a surfboard just doesn’t work. It’s basically the equivalent of using a piano as a floating lilo, and everybody has the good decency to not do that.