Made from Scratch | From Tree to Guitar

At Halo Custom Guitars, we build all our instruments from scratch. That means we build all our own bodies, necks and fretboards starting from the raw materials: Wood, wood, and more wood!

To give you an idea, here's me holding a nice chunk of African Mahogany (circa October 2014) that we eventually cut up into smaller pieces so that they could be shaped into various guitar body shapes:

Jeff Lee, Halo Custom Guitars, African Mahogany, Raw Material

There are several reasons why we choose to build from scratch, as opposed to buying our guitar bodies and necks from 3rd party manufacturers. But, the main reasons are based on our desire to (A) have more control over quality, and (B) to offer more customization.

When the wood is in its raw state, we are able to measure and control for the moisture content, the density/weight, and the grain pattern among other things. Wood that is too wet or too dry is unsuitable for crafting guitars, as they will be more prone to warping, twisting, cracking, and other issues due to the inherent characteristics of wood. Working with raw materials also gives us an opportunity to choose exactly how to cut the body blanks in the sense that we can choose specific areas that are either more dense vs. less dense, or more figured vs. less figured. This is very helpful for serving those customers who want their guitars to have a certain weight or grain pattern to them.

Because we're constantly building one-of-a-kind custom guitars for folks, we need to have the flexibility to change our body designs to suit each customer. It is not uncommon for us to receive requests for a sharper or rounder body bevel, a different cutaway, or various components (bridges, pickups, controls, etc.) located in different positions. If we didn't work from scratch, then we couldn't offer a lot of the customization that we do. Then there's the neck: we need to offer various widths, lengths, thicknesses, contours/profiles, radii, and headstock shapes. Click here to read a bit about our standard neck specifications.

There's also something different and special about making our guitars from scratch... a certain sense of fulfillment and joy that can only come from knowing that the final product, the Halo guitar, was built totally by us, from the ground up.