Tickets to gigs across the US are up for auction in April. It's all part of a very cool fundraising initiative for Music Rising, the charity set up by Edge to replace instruments musicians lost after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

You can bid for tickets to more than 80 concerts featuring sixty artists including Queensryche, Nine Inch Nails, Ben Harper, Def Leppard/Journey, New Cars/Blondie, Melissa Etheridge and Brad Paisley.

'It's been incredible to see the way these people who are in competition with one another are getting together on this,' Edge told Billboard this week. 'It really speaks very well of the industry and people's understanding and grasp of the scale of this problem.'

Visit Ticketmaster.com for information about the auctions which begin this Saturday, April 1st, and run through the month.

Each auction will feature four premium location tickets for venues with reserved seating and four general admission tickets for GA shows. Most auctions will also include one Epiphone guitar, provided by Gibson, and autographed by one of the show's artists.

Music Rising will also provide qualified professional musicians with $1,000 worth of shopping wholesale and at cost on Musiciansfriend.com.

'We felt like with $1,000 at cost we could equip someone with a playable instrument that would get them back on their feet," said Bob Ezrin, who is leading the project with Edge and Gibson Guitar chairman Henry Juszkiewicz. 'To date, 1,100 musicians have received at least $1,000 worth of stuff, whether it's an instrument or gear that they lost, things that made it possible to go out and ply their trade.'

Edge says they are talking about further ideas for later in the year but there's nothing definite.'We've talked about various things, but we're having to take this thing one step at a time. Speed [has been] a big priority.'

More on Music Rising here

Contribute to the appeal here.