New guitar maker

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hixmix

Halibut, North Dakota
December 27, 2005 latimes.
A New-Style Ax to Grind

RKS Guitars is betting its innovation will help it stand out in a high-end market dominated by a couple of players.

By David Colker, Times Staff Writer

Good looks helped RKS Guitars make the cover of BusinessWeek this summer, when the Oxnard company's futuristic, lime-green guitar was showcased in the magazine's annual design issue.

Whether the guitar will ever make the cover of Rolling Stone — or at least find a niche in the fast-growing electric guitar market — is another story.

Nearly all of rock's famed six-string slingers play models made by Fender Musical Instruments Corp. or Gibson Musical Instruments, making those guitars the dominant choices for players who can afford $1,000 and up for a premium ax.

The odds of cracking this stranglehold?

"Every year there are a bunch of guys who try," said Ken Daniels, owner of Truetone Music in Santa Monica, which specializes in high-end guitars. "And every year most of them drop like flies."

Ravi K. Sawhney said he wasn't thinking about the long odds when he decided to get into the guitar business — he was simply excited about the chance to break the mold.

A prominent product designer, Sawhney's RKS Design in Thousand Oaks has created the look of photo printers for Hewlett Packard Co., cellphones for Nokia and vacuum cleaners for Sears' Kenmore brand.

About five years ago, one of his designers started working up a new pattern for an electric guitar. Sawhney was taking guitar lessons at the time and decided to greenlight the project.

"I can't say we sat down and studied and analyzed the failures of the past," said Sawhney, 49.

Rocker Dave Mason, whom Sawhney met through mutual acquaintances, came on board early on to help with the design and tone. More recently, software entrepreneur Dale Jensen, the majority owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks and a rock 'n' roll enthusiast, provided additional funding.

Last year, the company opened a factory in North Carolina and shipped 300 guitars, Sawhney said. But he was making continuing changes in the design and wanted the plant closer to his design studio. In June, RKS opened the Oxnard factory, getting a boost soon thereafter from the BusinessWeek cover.

The guitar was the second-place winner in the Disruptive Design category, with the judges pointing to the instrument's unusual "open architecture" look, in which the electric pickups appear to float in the middle of a high-tech body.

Despite the acclaim, however, the company is in its infancy. Its 15-worker factory turns out just eight guitars a day, and RKS has sold only 27 instruments made in Oxnard to music stores. The instruments retail for $2,200 and up.

West L.A. Music, which bought 18 RKS guitars for its stores in West Los Angeles and Universal City last month, said it had sold only one.

"It's such a different look that they take a while to get used to," said West L.A. Music general manager Rick Waite. "But the response has been good from the musicians who try them. They like how they sound; they love how they feel."

In addition to the innovative design, Sawhney thinks that his fledgling company has several factors in his favor.

One is a surge in sales of electric guitars. Although most of the growth has been in cheaper imports from China selling for less than $150, the premium market is also booming. Sales of models retailing for $1,000 and up rose 27.5% last year, according to Music Trades magazine.

That's partly from baby boomers who now have the means to buy instruments they have wanted since high school. Many of these players already have Fenders and Gibsons, giving RKS — at least in theory — a shot at customers looking for something new and different.

"A golfer might have one set of clubs; a person into fishing might have a couple different rods," said Paul Majeski, publisher of Music Trades. "But you never find a serious guitar player with just one or two guitars. They have a trading card mentality.

"RKS already has something going," he added. "They are already ahead of where most companies are at this point. The odds are not insurmountable."

But they are daunting.

Fender has $380 million in annual sales (for guitars, amplifiers and related equipment) and Gibson has $210 million, Music Trades estimates. From there, it's a wide chasm to the next company that specializes in electric guitars: Paul Reed Smith, or PRS, Guitars, with $28.1 million.

Fender, with its famed Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars, and Gibson, best known for its Les Paul line, have largely defined the electric guitar sound in rock and pop for the last half a century.

At studio recording sessions, professional guitarists typically show up with at least one Fender and one Gibson, Grammy-winning record producer Jimmy Jam noted.

"I know in my mind what a Tele and a Strat and Les Paul sound like," said Jam, who has worked with pop stars including Usher, Mariah Carey and Gwen Stefani. "There is a comfort level for me, personally, when someone pulls the guitar I'm thinking of out of a case."

Paul Ash, president of the Sam Ash Music Corp. retail chain, believes RKS may have a shot if it can get rising stars to play its products.

"You have to make it a point to visit clubs," said Ash, whose father founded the company. "Show the guitar to musicians, let them handle them, try them for a few days."

Sawhney said the company would soon hire a talent scout to push the products to up-and-coming musicians. So far, they have been adopted by two young bands: Hanna McEuen, the country duo that recently played "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," and the touring metal group Greyscale.

RKS is also planning to spend $100,000 to promote its wares next month in Anaheim during the four-day NAMM (formerly the National Assn. of Music Merchants) trade show, an annual event for musicians who want to see the latest instruments.

"It's our coming-out party," Sawhney said.

He said it had cost about $7 million to get RKS to this point. Sawhney put up $3.5 million of his own money, he said, with Jensen and a partner kicking in $2 million and $200,000 from Mason.

The venture isn't a do-or-die proposition for any of the partners. Sawhney's primary business remains RKS Design, while Mason still plays about 150 concerts a year.

Jensen, 56, who also has a minority stake in the NBA's Phoenix Suns and sits on the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, said he signed on with RKS Guitars because it was "fun to be a part of it."

"I'm a risk taker," Jensen said.

The fact that the partners can afford to take such a view may also be an advantage for the company, Waite of West L.A. Music said.

"They have money behind them," Waite said. "That's not always the case."
 

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I think I'd have to see one up close and play'r to make a qualified critique.

otherwise, they look like they have a massive novelty potential.
 
They may or may not be fine guitars. I haven't played them, so I don't know. But I would be willing to bet they are out of business by this time next year. Very few people have been able to come along and do something radical to the design of guitars on a mass market scale. Every year a few guys try, and every they all fail. I mean, really, you can count on one hand the guys who have done anything really radical with guitar design and had a comercial sucess. Leo Fender, Ned Steinberger, and Ken Parker are the only ones I can think of, and they ALL had some degree of experience with building instruments before they tried mass marketing (Ned and Ken were both quite capable builders before they became industrialists, and Leo had the whole frying pan thing). If you're going to be radical, you need to have some idea of what it takes to make a functional guitar, and then you need to find some way to incorporate your new idea into the extreme conservitism of the guitar buying public. These guys havn't done any of that. a BIG mistake, without question. Or, as a customer said today about a similar idea, "it's not a guitar, it's a design element."

But hey, if I keep track of these guys, maybe I can buy some of their machines at the bank auction in the fall.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
true-eurt said:
And this Sunburst custom....it is only $4390.00 list price!!! :D....
But that includes free strings, set ups and a brand new BMW every year, for life. :D
 
Thats out of my $150 price range.

I could buy a vintage strat and a vintage super reverb blackface amp for aprox $4300.....or that guitar.

Damn, thats a hard choice to make....let me see...hmmmmm....decisions decisions.
:D
 
I don't think an ugly body (and hey, I have a So-Cal!) is particularly revolutionary. The Variax is far more innovative than that POS. I mean c'mon, they could have at least come up with their own pickup covers :p And a "wood polymer" body? What the heck is that, MDF :confused:
 
mshilarious said:
And a "wood polymer" body? What the heck is that, MDF :confused:

Yeah, that doesn't convince me at all. Doesn't that equate to a plastic guitar?

Haven't others gone down this kind of road before?

They will never make it on hype.
 
The only model that I immediately thought "maybe it's ok" was the Flying V. Since FV's are kinda astro/space cool the design didn't overpower the basic shape of the guitar.
 
mshilarious said:
This is the model for me :rolleyes:
I prefer the model holding the model you prefer!! The guitar IS the model you prefer isn't it?!!!:D

Those boots have gotta go though!!! ;)
 
Light said:
Leo Fender, Ned Steinberger, and Ken Parker are the only ones I can think of, and they ALL had some degree of experience with building instruments before they tried mass marketing . . .


Oh, and one other thing about those guys. They ALL brought a major FUNCTIONAL addition to production guitars. Leo Fender was the first mass produced electric guitar, as well as the first semi-stable trem system on a production guitar (not even getting into the first production electric bass, etc.). Ned Steinberger's design was far too radical for some people, but it is hard to ignore the fact that, since they are not made of wood, they are completely stable. And as for Ken Parker, his was the first major production guitar to come standard with piezo pickups in an electric guitar bridge. Add to the piezos the undeniably high quality of Ken's guitars (the only production solid body electric guitar I have EVER seriously considered buying was a Parker, when they first came out. Just killer guitars, although he does have to do something about that upper horn, because that corner in it digs into my sternum.)

In all these cases, the idea's which were used were not new. Solid body guitars had been around for a few years when Leo first put out the Broadcaster. Les Paul had made The Log, and of course Merle Travis had his Bigsby, plus there were a lot of electric "Hawaiian" guitars around, including the Rickenbacker and of course Leo's own Frying Pan. People had been experimenting with alternate materials for guitars since forever. The first one that pops into my mind is the Selmer plastic acoustic guitars, which sound surprisingly good considering they look like something you would buy at Toys R Us. Rick Turner and the guys at Alembic had been experimenting with Carbon Fiber and other high tech materials for a while when Ned brought his Bass out. And of course there are the aluminum necked Kramers from the seventies. And many different companies have been making after market piezos for electric guitar bridges for quite a while, including both Fishman and L.R. Baggs. Small shop builders have offered these, and some of the major manufacturers had special models with these as options.

Guitar buyers, for the most part, are unbelievably conservative. Any company who tries to sell the guitar community something completely new is in for a quick bankruptcy. You have to bring people along slowly, or else you fall the way of the 10,000 or so companies before you who didn't get it. Truly, I see it so many times, and they NEVER understand. Which, I suppose, is fine. I mean, that's how capitalism is supposed to work, right?


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
They're ugly and expensive and Variax will probably never have a patch for them.
 
I must admit the pink one is a bit garrish, but come on...that Sunburst one is purty!!! :D
 
We already have the strat, the tele, the solid body electric bass (4 string, 5 string, 6 string, the les paul, the SG, the semi hollow body 335, the seven string guitar....the single coil pickup, the humbucker pickup, the stacked humbucker pickup...and everything in between.
The most desirable guitars are STILL the bare bones basic guitar designs concieved in the early 50's.

Is there really a need for...yet.... another guitar design?


Why do we need another guitar design?

Maybe if tentative designers would ask themselves this question....and answer it......they wouldn't keep going bankrupt.

my 2 cents.
 
I think their biggest mistake...from the perspecting of looking at their pricing...is that they have NOTHING for the low-end consumer...nadda...zip! HOW can they expect to compete with the likes of Gibson, when Gibson has guitars available below $1000.00? It looks to me that RKS is banking on those that can already afford $2K+ axes to "suddenly beat down their doors, to buy an RKS." Do they even have a "farm league-type" brand, like Fender has with Squier and Gibson with Epiphone? I would certainly hope they're not banking on somebody (like at my price-point level) that's gotten started on a Gibson Les Paul Special Faded to suddenly go to RKS, when they can finally afford one of the more expensive U.S. built Les Pauls. Of course Fender has something for everybody, through all price points, from $150.00 Squier Affinities to U.S. built American Deluxes and Customs.

I completely agree with everybody else that's replied, so far, that the market share they're expecting simply won't be there, and as I've said, especially when they have nothing in the way of entry level and step up models. Even the likes of Paul Reed Smith and Martin have guitars in the entry level market!

Matt
 
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