The Story of
The story begins one rainy afternoon on the island of Maui. John Decker is attending an outdoor wedding when a tropical shower threatens to drench the party, including the solo guitarist. A fledgling classical guitarist himself, John feels the player's dilemma: Should he run for cover and risk the wrath of the bride's family or play on in the rain and ruin his guitar?
That day John is inspired to create a new kind of instrument, one that would play beautifully while enduring life's summers and winters, bumps and bruises, and even the occasional downpour, from the tropics to the poles.
This instrument -- the world's first all-graphite acoustic guitar -- is the first major advance in guitar making since the Italian masters perfected the present wood instrument nearly 400 years ago.
"I knew nothing about making guitars", John admits. So the first stage of RainSong's growth was John's search for people with a wide range of expertise.
"I
needed to work with someone who makes really great guitars. I read in New
Mexico Magazine about master guitar
maker Señor Lorenzo Pimentel, founder of Pimentel
and Sons in Albuquerque, and wrote to ask him if he'd be interested. 'Sounds
like a crazy idea; let's try it,' he said. (Of course, he admitted years
later that he never thought it would work!)
"And one day at a Maui Rotary Club meeting, I asked Chris Halford, an engineer skilled at working with fiberglass, if he knew where I could find someone who could work with the new exotic materials. I was excited when he said, 'I've worked with them, and I've got a friend at ICI who'll answer questions for me. Let me know what you want.'" So he began making little samples - 'coupons' - of varying combinations of fibers and resins for Pimentel to test.
"Señor Pimentel could tap a piece of something - whether wood or composites - and tell if it would make a good guitar," recalls John. The combinations with the best 'tap tones' were made into tops and mounted on guitar bodies which John bought at the Maui flea market, and sent to Pimentel for further evaluation.
The team soon focused their attention on graphite, both woven and unidirectional, mimicking wood's fiber structure to get the tone qualities of wood. Earlier attempts by others to replicate the sound qualities of wood had been thwarted by graphite's tendency to sound "tinny". The RainSong team reasoned that they would have to add something which had the damping characteristics of wood. Of the many materials they tested, aramid with its strong sound absorption solved the tinniness problem and created a new warmth. Experiments continued to determine the correct amounts of graphite, resins, and other materials.
Pimentel designs were adapted for the RainSongs, and one day when ideas
for necks and 
soundboards
were flowing, Señor Pimentel even grabbed a brown paper sack and sketched
out his secret bracing pattern on it. (That sack is in the company archives.)
Soon John needed someone to develop the molds and begin making the components
of RainSong guitars. He talked to aerospace folks, but they weren't used to
functioning on a tiny budget like his. He found a
maker of high-performance sailboats and sailboards, George Clayton, who was intrigued with the new concept, and Decker's treks to the Mainland began to include a
stop in California. 
For several years, John was the link between members of the team. On several occasions, however, he got them all together. "The energy, the snap and crackle of ideas from the varied kinds of experience and knowledge - well, you could feel it in the room!" is his vivid memory.
On discouraging days, they were all tempted to turn to familiar wood for crucial elements - the soundboard and braces. But John remembered that rainy wedding day and stuck to his vision of an all-composite instrument. Gradually - with a lot of thumping, strumming, and handwaving - the guitars were refined.
After five years of research and development, John began to show the
instruments to musicians, and ventured into the world of NAMM, the music
industry trade show in Los Angeles. "A lot of the people who walked
by the booth said, 'Yuk, a plastic guitar,'" he remembers. "And
a lot of folks acted like we had the Ebola virus and didn't want to be
anywhere near us.
However, a few stopped to tell their sad stories of guitars warped, split,
coming apart, and sounding terrible when moved into a different climate;
and they urged me to keep on -- 'if you can make them sound good!'"
John will admit now that the guitars looked pretty ratty in the early days; but gradually, as the surface finish improved and the process of building a totally new kind of instrument was refined, an elegant sleek style developed, with the graphite itself providing both color and texture.
For several years the development of RainSong guitars had been done
at three different places 
across
the country. This 'virtual corporation' was an arrangement which worked
well in the design stage of an instrument of such new and complex breeding,
and it kept the costs down; 
but
it posed logistical problems when the time came to start producing them.
So where to settle? "I had a consultant run the numbers, and Maui
- to my surprise - came out on top. And I already knew that there are a
lot of skilled composites technicians here, most of them building sailboards.
Plus some very skilled guitar makers; we need them since RainSongs are
made by hand the way luthiers have always done it." So in 1995 RainSong
untied the maile lei which blessed its new production facility on Maui,
the place of its rainy-day birth. By 1997, RainSong had doubled its working
area, and with its growing team is getting more RainSong guitars into the
hands of musicians.
The RainSongmaker:
Dr. John A. Decker, Jr., was awarded two degrees in aeronautical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in physics from Cambridge University.
During his career as a research manager and entrepreneur, John has gained expertise in acoustics, composite materials technology, optical and analytical instrumentation, semiconductors and vacuum technology, aerospace, solar energy and plasma physics; and he has taught himself to make fine wood guitars. He intends to get back to playing classical guitar.
Making Guitars Forever Better™
© RainSong Graphite Guitars 1999