Why I make carbon fibre guitars

January 2021

The musical instrument industry is a tiny niche and the most popular electric guitar models are designs from the 1950’s. Why bother?

It’s interesting, fun, and I want to. The rest of this post is essentially a retroactive justification of my feelings.

Before we talk about the material or the broader design principles we use at Rubato Guitars, I should explain my assessment of the current electric guitar industry.

In short, it is: conservative, unable/afraid to move away from old instrument designs, and tied to wood for sentimental reasons. This is sad. As far as instruments go, the electric guitar is almost brand-new.¹ In it’s heyday (the era of guitar heroes), there was a sense of innovation and progress, now it’s a lot of nostalgia and some snake-oil.

The way I see it, if the electric guitar were to be invented today there is little chance it would be made out of wood. Especially not the woods that are commonplace in the industry. These are of a different time. Wood is heavy and unreliable, it’s primary redeeming factor is that it’s cheap². It is so susceptible to changes in the weather that a massive metal rod has to be installed down the centre of a guitar’s neck to fight the uncooperative material. All this means no two wood electric guitars will feel the same or play the same, even if they come off the line one after the other.

Guitarists have deemed this unreliability a good thing. If you try a bunch of guitars you will eventually find “the one” and it will be magical. There are a few problems with this. Firstly, this implies that there are a lot of guitars being produced which are duds (or at least sub-par)—this is clearly bad³. If they aren’t coming out right, then you find out what’s causing the defects and fix it at the source—especially if the thing you’re selling is thousands of dollars. Rolex don’t send out a bunch of watches that don’t keep time or have slightly skew hands.

I actually think the luxury watch analogy here is quite appropriate. They’re nowhere near the best way to keep time, they make a big deal of their history, and the enthusiasts are obsessive. Part of their world consists vintage watches and historically accurate re-issues. But a far larger part of that world is modern horology. This stays true to the “essence” of what the community sees as a watch: springs and cogs. As long as they use springs and cogs, there are plenty of enthusiasts happy for the makers to go wild with modern materials, production processes and designs. Maybe they’re trying to keep time as best/elegantly as possible without digital assistance, maybe they just want new, nice things, whatever—it’s clear that they don’t only want the same old thing over and over again.

So for guitarists, the question is: what do you believe is the “essence” of an electric guitar? I think it’s something with strings and frets that you plug into an amp to make noise. How critical is wood in this equation?

There will always be the vintage stalwarts. I think this is a good thing. BMW doesn’t look down on classic car enthusiasts, because classic cars are cool. However, they don’t base their new production lines on approaches they used in the 60’s. They’ll take design inspiration from the old stuff, but they’re not going to use drum brakes.

Les Pauls and Strats are iconic. We love their sound and we want to be like our guitar heroes. But, when we now don’t have to, why should we inherit their limitations?