Tell us a bit about the company. What’s the backstory here?

It started in 2000, when Ravi started taking guitar lessons. Ravi Sawhney is the founder and the “RKS” in RKS Design. He has a design firm here in Thousand Oaks, California. Essentially, he’s been a very, very successful industrial designer. He’s designed products for Hewlett Packard, Amana, Kenmore, Epson. A bunch of different companies. He started taking guitar lessons and went out looking for a guitar stand to put his guitar on. He couldn’t find one that he liked so he went to Paul Janowski, who is kind of the president of the company, and he says, “Let’s design a guitar stand.” Paul says half jokingly, “Hey, let’s design a guitar!” And Ravi goes, “Ha-ha-ha. We should do a guitar stand.”

So Ravi, who never sleeps, thought about it overnight and then just as kind of a fun project for his design team said, “Let’s design a guitar.” Everybody was into the idea because it’s a fun thing to do when you’re [usually] designing things like refrigerator doors. So it ended up being something that was kind of crazy. They developed almost 15 lbs. of illustrations for the thing. They had 400-500 designs of guitars because these guys were just let loose. And Ravi saw this one that looked like a human skeleton. It had ribs and stuff like that and everybody dug it. It didn’t have a headstock at the time. It was kind of strange looking. They said, “Let’s do this one. Let’s model it up.” So they did, and they made a semi-working prototype of it.

Well, Ravi’s brother happened to know Dave Mason. He lives close by us here in Ojai so he said, “Why don’t we get Dave to at least look at it and see what he thinks of it.” Dave came in and said, “No. It needs this, and it needs this. It needs tuning machines on top. Don’t make a headless guitar. It’s too clunky here.” He totally ripped it apart expecting nothing really to come of it.

So he left, and a couple of weeks later, Dave gets a call from Ravi saying, “We did it.” Because of the ability here with the design team they can do rapid crazy changes over and over and over again. So Dave came in, and he was just blown away that they had done all this stuff. And he, said, “Okay, well this is good but this is not good, and this is not good.” And that went on for almost two years until they had something that was ready for the market. At that point in time, Dave said, “Wow. This is the guitar I’m going to play now on stage.” So he’s been playing them on stage since. He kind of got involved officially at that point. He’s pretty much the co-founder of the company. He’s been playing them on the road. He’s a great emissary for us.

So they decided to get this off the ground. They were building them all in-house in Thousand Oaks at the design facility. And they were building one every month or something. It was slow. So they built a factory in North Carolina where they shared space with some other manufacturers. They couldn’t really get it off the ground. They tried to distribute it through Hohner at that point in time and couldn’t really get it happening. And they were then making something like 50 guitars in one year, and it still really wasn’t there. So Ravi pulled it all back over to Oxnard about this time last year. The factory was already being built this time last year. It’s an 11,000 square foot factory, and he pretty much went for it at that point in time. Now we’re capable of building something like 10 a day.

So it’s only in the last year that you’ve actually ramped up production?

We look at it as our having been a company since 2000 as far as that goes, but we really have only been pursuing it since December. We got our first regular retail dealer in December with West L.A. Music. Since then, we’ve been adding on dealers every month now. It’s starting to really catch on.

We’re still probably only about 25 people at this point. Because of modern production and the factory and because everybody is pretty much working 24/4, we can get a lot done. Plus the way our guitars are built, it makes for a very efficient assembly process. You know, everything is CNC. Everything is put together and the design is very good so everything ends up going together in a smooth process. It’s all part of the Open Architecture design that Ravi came up with, which refers to [the guitar’s] center core. You can change different body shells with it. It allows for efficient manufacturing as well as an interesting sounding instrument. Everything is very resonant as a result.

Let’s talk about that design. The second you see these guitars you know they’re like no other guitar you’ve ever seen. A lot of makers say they have a unique design but they don’t really. RKS, on the other hand, is truly unique.

It’s a challenge for us, too, because guitar players are a conservative lot, and it is a very, very unique design. But the reason it came about is that first off it’s a design team doing it. So they’re going to look at what’s out there and what makes something unique. And this guitar came from that.

We looked at some of the guitar innovations in the last 20 to 30 years. Obviously the chief one being the Strat 50 years ago. That was a pretty big innovation, and it was actually laughed at. If you look at the first two years of sales stats on the Strat, they’re dismal. If you read any of the stuff from Forrest White and Bill Carson and people who were actually [around] back then, they were like, “Boy we didn’t think it was going to survive.”

But it also came about from things like ergonomics. It came from [asking questions like] where are the controls on a normal guitar and what’s the problem with that? So we ended up putting the controls very conveniently located yet totally out of the way of your playing.

We looked at things from a totally different standpoint. We tried to make something that was new and unique, but at the same time, too, we fully respected what has happened before us. We know where things have kind of not been successful. You know, everything isn’t a success. Parker guitars are totally a success. But at the same time there are things about their innovations that rub people the wrong way. And so we tried to avoid things that rub people that wrong way so that they would instantly feel very comfortable with the instrument.

We did things with the back of the guitar. Now this is totally twisted, but this is the way the design mind works: There’s a contour on the back that’s unique to this guitar. They sat down and thought about what would feel good when you’re cradling up against it. The answer was some chick’s butt. So they actually took images of J-Lo, and they modeled it and put it together to where the contours of her mid-back and the top of her butt are reflected in the guitars. If you look at them from a certain angle you definitely can see it.

That’s the kind of stuff that we did that’s subliminal and yet once you put the guitar you go, “Okay, this feels good.”

It sounds like having non-music oriented or non-guitar-playing people in on the design process was an advantage.

It certainly was. There’s certainly a good amount of players here, that’s why everyone was really into it in the beginning. Every time you get a group of artists and designers together a certain amount of them are going to be musicians. Just like a lot of musicians will paint and things like that. Joni Mitchell is a fabulous painter. Miles Davis was a pretty good painter. So there’s always cross-over, but I think that having people not fully absorbed in it helped a bunch.

In what significant ways does your guitar’s design differ from a more traditional design? What are some of the key ways in which they’re set apart from the crowd?

The key thing is that because of the Open Architecture design the place where it joins the body is a relatively thin area compared to a solid body electric guitar. A Les Paul is a little over two inches thick in the middle whereas our guitar is two inches thick in the middle but dips down a little over a half inch for a segment that’s about an inch and half wide. That’s on the wood guitars. And that allows for a lot of resonance to occur. It allows the guitar to vibrate earlier and bigger than instruments of its typical thickness. So it ends up being a very, very lively and almost acoustic-sounding guitar when you play it unplugged. And then when you plug it in that resonance works really well. You turn an amp up and the notes bloom from it. Because it has a fairly concentrated small body, the neck-through-core portion, it ends up being a very defined and articulate and not muddy sounding instrument. Because it doesn’t have a lot of broad thick wood to hamper what’s going on with the notes.

I always compare it to cheap guitars, like the Melody Maker that Gibson made, which was only about an inch thick. It wasn’t a very thick guitar, and yet guys love them because they rock. They end up vibrating a lot. Same with SGs to a certain degree, although SGs are a slight bit thicker. That’s why people like them. Because they vibrate like crazy. SGs and Melody Makers are not really the most comfortable guitars because they kind of cut into you. Ours actually has the comfort of a thicker guitar and ends up feeling very nice on your body. We add those wings on it, And of course you’ve got J-Lo’s butt poking into you! All the contours are there. Yet it’s a thin and lively guitar. It ends up being almost like a hollow body guitar.

Some of the guitars we make are made out of a material called Tenite, which is a polymer made out of wood pulp from cottonwood trees that we wrap over aluminum ribs. It’s injection-molded and we can do it in clear plastics. We can do it in any color. We can get it almost in any color and generally when we’re making our instruments we end up painting it because it ends up being more of a traditional looking surface that way. Those are the hollow body guitars.

Then we make solid body guitars, which I’ve kind of been concentrating on in this conversation so far. But the Tenite guitars are essentially a hollow body guitar because they are only about a quarter inch thick all the way around the shell surface. But because of that and the way its constructed, the aluminum ribs transfer the vibration to the shell. The shell vibrates like crazy because it’s made out of that Tenite, which is made out of wood pulp. So it ends up actually sounding woody for what is essentially a plastic. Because of all of that and it being a hollow body, and because of the Open Architecture design, you don’t have the problems usually inherent with a hollow body guitar. Because hollow bodies are generally closed they end up feeding back really easy if you’re in front of a loud amp. This guitar is much more open. That allows it to breath a lot more. It ends up being like a really, really versatile hollow body. You can get all of the sounds and the same kind of attack that you would out of a hollow body, but without any of those problems.

How did you arrive at the choice of Tenite for a raw material? What does it add to the RKS formula?

Well, we experimented with a bunch of materials. And the company that makes Tenite approached us as we were going through this. And when we tried it with that material, it was like… Boom! That was it. It just sounded so much better. We tried a lot of different materials. We were using some sort of acrylic originally, and those guitars always sounded a little bit more dead than what you would traditionally hear with a plastic-based guitar. Obviously Ampeg has made some out of Lucite. There have been other plastic guitars in the past, which have tended to make peoples opinions of plastic guitars be what they are. But I think anybody who would pick up one of our instruments would say, “This is great!” They’re kind of shocked by it. So the material ends up being something that we really liked.

We ended up going round and round on that. But Tenite took the transfer from the aluminum ribs really well. It ends up sounding very organic. It’s actually a really organic sounding electric guitar. It doesn’t sound like it’s made out of plastic and aluminum and all this high-tech material. That’s the one thing we were always going back to: Let’s make this sound good and pleasing, something a seasoned player is going to play and go, “Oh, okay. I get this. This is not something that’s weird.”

We also have this guitar called the Wave guitar, which is the new one and is priced at $899. That’s a different plastic.

Tell us a little bit about the Wave.

We really needed a guitar that’s under $1,000. I’ve been selling music products forever. I’ve worked at a bunch of other manufacturers. To me, it was like the competition kind of starts at $699. You can get a U.S.-made guitar for $699. And Ravi then started defending his guitar. “Well, you know we’ve got all these design features, all these benefits,” and stuff like that. But we all kind of came to the agreement that it doesn’t really matter. You’re still competing for a hook on the wall. But we wanted to have the benefits of [our high-end] guitars. We wanted to be able to bring the benefits of our guitar to what would be an intermediate-to-advanced user in that [price] realm. Still keep the quality up. Still be able to do everything. And build it in the U.S.A. All at the same time. These are crazy challenges.

What ended up coming up was that we needed to make a bolt-on body and we needed to make the body itself, which is the most complicated piece to CNC, something that was essentially just a part. It’s not something that we’re spending hours and hours cutting out. So we injection molded the body out of a high-gloss polycarbonate which is really resonant and super tough. And then made shells out of that as well. We experimented with the shells. We knew we needed to make the body out of polycarbonate because it needs to be rigid enough. We ended up trying a bunch of different materials on the shells including Tenite, and we ended up using ABS on it. It’s unique in that our goal was to be able to build one of those guitars from beginning to end in two hours. It is a manufacturing marvel because most of the work is put into the neck. The rest of it, the electronic and everything is just click-click-click. There it is!

So in this case design ingenuity was able to lower the price without dramatically affecting the quality.

That was the main thing. The quality was the issue. We went back and forth and back and forth on neck joint until we had one that actually coupled with the bridge really well. It’s a unique neck joint in that it’s like a typical neck joint, almost like a Fender-style neck joint up at the top. But then it has an extension, this tongue, that goes all the way to the bridge. We were trying it without that, and we were getting good sound, but it wasn’t like anything that was more than just a Strat or whatever. It was passable, but it didn’t have the kind of “zing” of the other instruments, and we were all kind of bummed about it. When we finally redid the neck joint and put it in the first time, it was like all of a sudden this guitar is really resonant. It came alive. It ends up being that one of the cool things about it is that the shells on the back, because they’re only held in with six screws, they just bolt in with hex screws, The neck is actually screwed on from the inside of the guitar, which is unique. It’s bolted on. When we say “bolted on” we don’t mean screws into wood. We mean we actually bolt it on with nuts and bolts. So it’s actually bolted on the inside of the core, and then the shell is put over the back. The shell is held on by six hex screws. And so because of that you can change shells at will. It’s the first guitar that we know of that can change bodies in seconds. We’re offering a bunch of different bodies. We have a blank one that you can paint yourself. We have all the colors you can order and interchange and swap them out. So you can buy a Wave guitar and literally within seconds change it over.

How did you arrive at the decision to equip RKS guitars with Elixir Strings?

Paul Janowski, the guy who originally joked that they should make a guitar, a long time ago worked at Schecter guitars with Tom Anderson and Dave Schecter, actually worked in the shop with them. That’s how he cut his teeth. So he knew how to build a guitar. He knew how to put a factory together. He’d already done that with those guys. He went to design school and became a designer in the interim. That’s what he was doing for Ravi. It’s kind of funny that it comes full circle. When we were deciding what to put on our guitars, you know obviously Tom uses Elixir Strings, and Brian Swerdfeger showed them to me when I was at Line 6 so we all knew about them. Obviously they’re great strings, but one of the key things for us is the fact that we can put a guitar on the store floor and it’s going to stay that way for a good long time. It’s so important that you pick up an instrument and the strings are bright and together.

They’re good strings. But to us the fact that the longevity is there is key. It’s going to be a big thing for us to know that we’re confident and comfortable that when an instrument is hanging in the store and ends up in the artist’s hands or the player’s hands that he’s going to have a good experience. Not just with a great quality string, but with a great quality string that’s going to be fairly fresh. That’s tough for a manufacturer to have something like that going on. Every guitar we ship from our $899 Wave on up ships with them. Our basses ship with them. Everything ships with them.

Let’s talk about what’s coming up down the road. What can we expect from RKS in the months ahead and 2007?

We’re introducing two basses. We did a soft introduction at Winter NAMM, but at Summer NAMM, we’re actually showing the basses pretty big. We’ve come up with another wood body out of swamp ash that we’re introducing. And down the road for us it’s just about establishing more and more dealerships and doing the marketing and kind of getting it to happen. It’s interesting that in a start-up, the product is king at first and the marketing is way, way back in everybody’s mind. One of the challenges for me coming on board is to take this and make it actually seem like something other than an oddity. So we’ve been doing advertising. We’ve just produced our first catalog. We’ve redesigned out website. For us in the coming year, it’s probably more about getting the foothold going and doing some other guitars perhaps, but really it’s about getting it into artists’ hands, which we’re working on.

Do you find that the guitar’s uniqueness works against it in certain ways?

Oh yeah, of course. I would say that that its biggest challenge is that it is unique. But what we’ve noticed with everyone is that when we put it in their hands and they sit down and play it, they go, “Oh, wow, this is cool.” And they can’t put it down. We haven’t had anybody play the guitar and go, “Eh, it’s not for me.” It’s always the other way around.

Our challenge is to get people to experience it. One of the things that’s kind of critical about being down here in southern California is that we’re down here with Tom [Anderson] who makes just an amazing guitar, one of the best guitars on the planet. We’re down here with the Fender custom shop. We’re down here with Jon Suhr guitars, who make a fabulous instrument. We’re here with James Tyler. We here with Don Grosh. There’s a bunch of really, really good high-end guitar manufacturers down here. So our benchmark is pretty well set. If we’re not as good as those guys then we’re doing something wrong. Uniqueness is one thing, and we definitely are that, but [we also need to be] a great-playing instrument that carries the uniqueness, if you know what I mean. We better be awful good. So that ends up being our thing, the quality is exceptional.