Community Highlights: Meet Chaz Ginest of TEN32 Guitars

Today we’d like to introduce you to Chaz Ginest.

Hi Chaz, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was introduced to CNC and CAD/CAM when I was 21, and immediately loved it. Within 2 years I had a loan for my own CAD/CAM license and CNC machine. I have no formal training with either but I had been exposed to “old school” woodworking through my Dad, and I was always a computer geek, so it was a good intersection of experience for me. Since then I’ve been self-taught and continually refining my skills, products and processes. Today I have a patent on modular guitar construction techniques, which offers a variety of benefits both to players and from a production manufacturing perspective.

The best example of this is the patented TEN32 bolt-on headstock, which enables the instrument to be broken down into 3 parts, all small enough to fit in a purpose built backpack case that fits under an airplane seat. The idea is to offer guitarists a way to travel with a pro-quality instrument without any risk of being forced to check it with the airline. Typically travel guitars suffer from one or more major sacrifices that would preclude them from use in a studio or on stage. I wanted to travel without any of the typical risks or sacrifices, but this is just one example of many exclusive use cases that TEN32 guitars enable. I’m all about options – if a bolt-on headstock doesn’t resonate, I also offer conventional necks and cases, along with improvements to literally every other aspect of the instrument. I’ve been playing for 27 years myself, so I’ve been thinking about ways to improve the instrument for a long time.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Emotionally, of course not! Being an entrepreneur grates against societal expectations and even human evolution. If I built guitars the same way everyone else does, I probably could have cut several years off my journey, but I chose to invent new ways to build and finish my guitars which meant there was no textbook, university course, apprenticeship, YouTube video series, or anything else to learn from, I just had to grind through thousands of iterations via trial and error to get things right. When I’m feeling overwhelmed I remind myself that icons like James Dyson and Thomas Edison had similar journeys, although I don’t consider myself remotely on their level!

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
I remember being disappointed by the level of difficulty of maintaining and upgrading guitars from the first day I started playing. The more I experimented with guitars, the deeper that disappointment became. Some aspects are almost in mythology territory, like for example adjusting neck relief with the truss rod.

Most guitar players won’t even consider attempting that particular adjustment – they’ll just take it to a tech. The issue isn’t that the concept is too complex, its that legacy builders have done a poor job making the truss rod accessible, or have used very cheap parts that are easily damaged, which is true for many aspects of electric guitars. Most are designed to increase profit margins, not to be easy to work on, maintain or upgrade. The result of that type of bottom-line dominant thinking is a long list of issues handed down to the customer/player. When that’s the case for the better part of a century, you cant blame guitarists for feeling fear when considering making changes to their beloved instruments.

One of the pillars of my philosophy is to make guitars that are intuitively easy to maintain and modify, but I’ve taken that concept to the extreme. Not only are TEN32 Guitars intuitive, but they represent a universally modular guitar platform. This means every neck I build is compatible with every body and every headstock, so all those parts are interchangeable. You can swap parts like nuts, electronics, and even finishes. I believe the instrument should be a highly versatile tool for creative expression in every way possible. Most guitars actually limit creative expression simply because they’re not designed to be easy to modify.

How do you think about happiness?
Identifying and solving production problems and refining designs and processes, all of which ultimately leads to better instruments, produced faster with zero sacrifices to quality, playability, tone, 0r feel. I’ve experienced so much frustration in the last 18 years trying to bring my vision into reality that I’ve become obsessed with solving every problem that might result in a defect, or even a slowdown in the production process. Ultimately this is what all physical product manufacturers are doing, but usually in a way that severely limits creativity.

Using a modular approach not just to construction but also to design enables me to mix and match both functional and aesthetic elements in literally hundreds of thousands of different physical configurations. I have 7 body models, 5 contour packages, 6 texture packages, 5 pickup layouts, and 6 electronics layouts (so far). That produces 6,300 combinations for bodies alone. Then add 4 neck scale lengths, 3 neck profiles, and 11 headstock designs and you’re over 830,000 possible configurations. This doesn’t include aesthetic choices like different wood species or finish colors – these are strictly physical permutations. That’s how I refine production processes without limiting creative options.

Pricing:

• Base models excluding cases currently start at $2500. Custom options will increase the price from there.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ten32guitars.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ten32guitars/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ten32guitars
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ten32guitars

Image Credits
All my own images, I’m sure you can tell 😀