Tuesday, August 28, 2007
The resurgence of heavy metal helps electric guitar makers.
CUPERTINO, Calif. (AP) — There aren’t too many mean-looking things in Cupertino, this sleepy Silicon Valley haunt of Apple employees and overachieving middle-schoolers.
But there’s something gruesome growing in one corner of town: Halo Custom Guitars, Inc.
Fueled by a resurgence in heavy metal music and its numerous dark sub-genres, Halo makes and sells evil-looking instruments with bodies carved to resemble rotting flesh, distended eyeballs and bone. The demonically themed guitars primarily find their way into the hands of death metal musicians.
Regular heavy metal music can cover the usual topics of scorn and despair, while the death metal sub-genre leans heavily on growled vocals and themes such as Satanism and dark mythology.
Both are an important niche for electric guitar manufacturers such as five-year-old Halo. It sold 200 guitars its first year in business and now sells 200 to 300 a month in direct sales and another 200 per month to dealers, said co-founder Waylon Ford.
“Ever since we started making more outrageous designs, we started selling more guitars,” he said. “We really owe a lot to the metal genre.”
Marketing strategy
Street teams of Halo guitar players and hangers-on keep the company’s buzz alive across the U.S., posting links to their favorite Halo-using bands on their MySpace pages and posting images of the lithesome Halo Gals, young models that appear in ads wearing little more than underworldly undergarments.
More established guitar makers are taking notice of metal’s rebirth as well. B.C. Rich Guitars boasts an aggressive-looking lineup that includes the “Warbeast,” “Warlock” and “Dagger,” the latter available in the color “Blood,” according to the company’s Web site. The Warlock is pointy from all angles, while the Warbeast looks a bit like a Fender Stratocaster with an attitude problem.
“B.C. Rich had a huge heyday in the ’80s, obviously when metal and big hair bands were all the rage,” said Ted Burger, a spokesman for Davitt & Hanser Music Group, the Hebron, Ky.-based parent company of B.C Rich.
Back in vogue
Then came the ’90s and Nirvana and grunge bands that wanted nothing to do with big hair or brightly colored guitars. Grunge bands sported unkempt hair, plaid shirts and let their standard guitars do the talking.
Now grunge is a trivia game answer and metal is king again.
“People just missed the pleasures of a nice piercing guitar solo,” Ford said.
Ford takes his designs to the extreme, and his guitars boast names such as “Satyr,” Hellfire,” and “Fallen Angel.” The “demon” headstock, where tuning pegs adjust string tension, looks like a horned profile of Lucifer himself.
Halo sells custom-made models as well as lower-priced machine-cut guitars fashioned at an overseas plant.
The metal niche guitars fill a void that your regular old Fender Strat or Gibson Les Paul won’t. Those standard guitars look out of place in the hands of a growling 20-year-old lead metal guitarist wearing black nail polish and white face paint screaming into a microphone about Norse mythology, a favorite theme of many metal practitioners.