About Us

My love affair with the guitar started when I was 9 years old. Having only cheap beginners guitars around I almost gave up many times. After playing on guitars with strings sitting half an inch off the neck I was quite impressed one day when my brother borrowed a Fender® Jazz Master from a friend. I was not allowed to touch it but did anytime it was not being guarded. I will never forget how wonderful it felt to be able to play a guitar that did not wear me down in 5 minutes.

Seven years later I got my first “real” guitar. A Gibson® SG. Shortly after that I got my first Fender Stratocaster®. I could never leave guitars alone. I got good at setting them up. The days following college, while I was playing professionally in Austin, Texas, I was called upon by many musicians in the Austin area to set their guitars up. Either I was good at it or they liked my set up fee of $0.00. In 1997 a friend asked me to build him a guitar using an old Allparts body he had been sitting on for years. It came out pretty good but I was not completely satisfied. So I went on a mission to find the best combination of parts to build a Fender Stratocaster copy. After trying bodies and necks from many shops all over the world I finally decided the only way I was going to get the quality I was looking for was to do it myself. I was getting pretty good at it when I met my current partner, Mike Curd. Mike instantly started showing me things I needed to know, the secrets to making an exceptional guitar body. It became clear that it would take years to get to the skill level that Mike had already obtained so we began talking of a partnership and how we could control the quality to meet my specifications. Thus began Rahan guitars, named after my daughters Rachel and Hannah.

After much trial and error we have perfected the Stratocaster copy. We feel our guitars rival the quality of the Fender Custom Shop guitars. With less overhead and by selling direct to the customers we can sell a quality guitar at a much more reasonable price. We have also done a lot of experimenting with exotic woods and have put together some very beautiful guitars. Beautiful to look at, to play and beautiful sounding.

Rahan guitars have been sold locally in Houston and Austin by word of mouth. We decided that in 2002 we would launch our web site to make Rahan guitars more available to other areas. Also as an outlet for seconds and used pieces. We also may sell some of our prototypes.

On surfing the web we found a sites that claims to have the best guitars in the world. We bought a couple of these guitars to inspect as research and made some conclusions. One is that we could build a guitar of equal quality so we set out to do that. The other realization is that if we put up a good web site we could sell not only our guitars but also a select few others. As of this writing (January 2002) we have one other guitar maker thinking of coming on board and have contacted a few others. We will soon be offering guitars other than Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster facsimiles. The future is looking more and more exciting every day!