RKS Guitars Black Guitar

RKS GUITARS

RKS GUITARS

Reinventing the electric guitar to drive sustainability and increase usability for the optimal playing experience.

Reinventing the electric guitar to drive sustainability and increase usability for the optimal playing experience.

Industrial Design | Human Factors

The RKS team incubated RKS Guitars in the year 2000 as an internal project, which quickly turned into a guitar company that was building and selling guitars out of the factory RKS engineered as its own production and custom guitar demands in California. The design team, all lovers of all types of music with many guitar players themselves . This love for music and a friendship with Rock-N-Roll Hall-of-Famer Dave Mason sparked the idea of reinventing the electric guitar for the first time in decades. Through this collaboration, the team benchmarked the competitive landscape of guitars utilizing our Psycho-Aesthetics methodology to identify the critical interactions and touch-points of the guitar to identify areas that can be improved and leverage Dave’s expertise to understand what had to be the same. The results created a new guitar system platform with intellectual property around a perfected “Neck Through” core , neck and headstock, that attached to a conductive Aluminum ribbing system to enable a platform to interchange the outer shells while providing the tonal quality and range they have become known for. Additionally, the new RKS guitar was the first “sustainable” and removed the need for exotic tonewoods that are responsible for much of the deforestation.By collaborating initially with Eastman Plastics and later Weyerhauser to utilize their Tenite, a material made from the wood pulp of farmed cottonwood trees and scrap wood bi-product. RKS and Mason prototyped and tested in studios and in concert for years until they created that electric guitar tones and play that musicians would fell in love with. The RKS Guitar was featured on the cover of BusinessWeek as “the Best Design of the Year”, is played by Guitar Heroes and has empowered guitar players in a new, fresh, sustainable and great sounding way, doing something that’s never been done before!

“A  f***ing impressive device, old boy. It sounds great!! Ronnie’s rocking too!!”

-Keith Richards, Guitarist for The Rolling Stones 

Industrial Design | Human Factors

The RKS team incubated RKS Guitars in the year 2000 as an internal project, which quickly turned into a guitar company that was building and selling guitars out of the factory RKS engineered as its own production and custom guitar demands in California. The design team, all lovers of all types of music with many guitar players themselves . This love for music and a friendship with Rock-N-Roll Hall-of-Famer Dave Mason sparked the idea of reinventing the electric guitar for the first time in decades. Through this collaboration, the team benchmarked the competitive landscape of guitars utilizing our Psycho-Aesthetics methodology to identify the critical interactions and touch-points of the guitar to identify areas that can be improved and leverage Dave’s expertise to understand what had to be the same. The results created a new guitar system platform with intellectual property around a perfected “Neck Through” core , neck and headstock, that attached to a conductive Aluminum ribbing system to enable a platform to interchange the outer shells while providing the tonal quality and range they have become known for. Additionally, the new RKS guitar was the first “sustainable” and removed the need for exotic tonewoods that are responsible for much of the deforestation.By collaborating initially with Eastman Plastics and later Weyerhauser to utilize their Tenite, a material made from the wood pulp of farmed cottonwood trees and scrap wood bi-product. RKS and Mason prototyped and tested in studios and in concert for years until they created that electric guitar tones and play that musicians would fell in love with. The RKS Guitar was featured on the cover of BusinessWeek as “the Best Design of the Year”, is played by Guitar Heroes and has empowered guitar players in a new, fresh, sustainable and great sounding way, doing something that’s never been done before!

“A  f***ing impressive device, old boy. It sounds great!! Ronnie’s rocking too!!”

-Keith Richards, Guitarist for The Rolling Stones 

Play Video
RKS Guitars Wave Guitar
Various designs for RKS Guitars
RKS Guitars on the cover of Businessweek magazine
RKS Guitar in green
List of musicians who played RKS Guitars
RKS Guitars Schematics
Showing the workshop where RKS Guitars were developed
Product development for RKS Guitars
Patent for RKS Guitars
Harvard Case study of RKS Guitars
Different designs of RKS Guitars
RKS Guitars Kama Sutra guitar
RKS Guitars showing core design
RKS Guitars showing Dave Mason and Ravi Sawhney
RKS Guitar played by Bauhaus
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Project Spotlight
GameVice
A new mobile gaming category to enable gamers to play video games on the go with physical controls and no latency.
BigBox Play
A robust low-tech system that provides children with the ability to advance through creative play.
FloWater
A more premium, refreshing, and sustainable alternative to disposable water bottles.

Experience more of our work.