Peter Frampton's next studio album, which he hopes to have out before the end of the year, will present acoustic renditions of some of his favorite songs from past releases.

"It's much more interesting than I thought it was going to be," Frampton tells Billboard. "I thought, 'Well, I'll just go into the studio and I'll whip off 10 or 11 of my songs just the way I wrote them.' So I sat down and I started singing them; when I started first listening to them they all sounded like they were on stage, without the band. It's just the way I've been doing these songs for 40 years, some of them."

As he continued building out the track listing — which currently includes nine re-recorded tracks, among them "Do You Feel Like We Do," "Lines on My Face" and "Sail Away," along with one new song — Frampton says he came to realize he needed to take a different approach. "I want as if you'd come up to the hotel before the show and we were talking and I'd be, 'Hey, I've got this new song 'Lines on My Face' I want to play you,' and I sit on the bed and I pull out an acoustic and I play it to you," he explained. "That's the quality I'm shooting for."

In addition to working on the new LP, Frampton's busy stumping for AxCent Tuning Systems, the company behind a new digital tuning gadget that allows for instant, one-touch guitar tuning via a keypad on the instrument or through its smartphone app. AxCent is trying to raise $1 million through a crowdfunding campaign, and in the taped message above, Frampton lends his support while offering a demonstration.

AxCent's hoping to use the funds to manufacture a consumer version of its tuning system, which you can see in action in the video; it's already used by a cadre of professional players that includes Jimmy Page, Graham Nash and Frampton himself, who's offering an array of perks and memorabilia to deep-pocketed pledgers. "I'm always writing songs in different tunings, some of which I forget, so you can put your custom tunings into this guitar and it remembers them for me -- which is more than I can do -- and within a second or two you can change it from that particular tuning back to standard and you can play a solo," he enthuses. "And it's incredibly precise. It's never failed me." For more information, visit the AxCent campaign page.

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