On a warm afternoon in Sacramento, California, we paid a visit to the Kauer Guitars shop to meet with the Kauer team and their fearless leader, Doug Kauer. We sat down with Doug next to his green 1964 Chevrolet C10 pickup, machinery hard at work and the smell of freshly grilled burgers floating through the air, for a talk about Spanish mahogany, The Simpsons, freight trains, international guitar shows, keeping things artistic, and constantly improving.
Can you introduce yourself and describe your role at Kauer Guitars?
So, I am Doug Kauer, I am the idiot in charge here at Kauer Guitars. I am the guy who was dumb enough to start this place and somehow stubborn enough to stick with it. So, I started by myself building guitars for fun in the mid-aughts, which is hard to describe that I lived in the previous century, now.
I just started building guitars for fun, I grew up working in my parents' cabinet shop and made stuff for fun and made stuff on the CNC. Then in 2008, I took advantage of the recession because there was nothing else to do. I started building guitars kind of full-time, designed the Daylighter, which was my first original model, and then, been here ever since.
What's Kauer's superhero origin story? No detail too small!
So, like I said, I grew up woodworking. I always wanted to play guitar, my parents told me if I got good grades, they would get me lessons. I gave up and taught myself how to play guitar...that was easier than working hard in school.
I took AutoCAD my senior year in high school because it counted as a math class and when I got through precalculus I knew I was done. That was the end of my math career and I was too dumb to go any further. Right around the same time, my dad brought probably the first CNC for a cabinet shop in the area and it just became kind of my job to program stuff on it.
Same thing, I grew up working on cars, always made stuff, and then when I got into guitar building, I didn't know there was a boutique industry. I was just kind of doing it for fun and then kind of found that out, and then I met Nik Huber* walking my first NAMM Show. I went in 2007 and walked it and introduced myself because someone else said I should meet Nik.
Of Nik Huber Guitars
I went to my first real guitar show in Montreal, which was, back then, part of the Montreal Jazz Festival, and walked in and Nik remembered me, knew who I was, was super kind to me, everybody else was too, but specifically Nik Huber was that guy. I just fell in love with the people who do this.
What would you describe as the "secret sauce" of a Kauer electric guitar?
The joke is, when I turned forty, I finally reached the age I always was. I've always been an old man, and so like I was that kid in high school that listened to Eric Clapton and Steely Dan, and this is the late nineties.
The sonic formula I've kind of settled into is definitely more traditional-adjacent. The main wood we use was through another builder I made friends with turned me on to it, Spanish mahogany. The trade name is Spanish cedar, we got tired of explaining that it's not cedar or Spanish, it's basically Honduran's cousin. I'm convinced you can't build a bad sounding guitar with it. It just consistently hits for the formula we want.
I'm in kind of the minority camp, I think more people are coming to this, I'm a much bigger believer that the body wood is not as important as we make it out to be. It's important, but the neck will drastically change how a guitar reacts, how it sounds, and basically the response curve of that guitar.
What drives Kauer's guitar naming schemes?
So, we're in Sacramento. Sacramento, among other things, the claim to fame of being two hours from everything else, we're also the starting point for the transcontinental railroad. That's like Sacramento's big thing. I love trains and I love large mechanical things, so a lot of the early guitars were named after trains.
That actually kind of started because, when I had designed what became the Daylighter, and it was something I did for fun and I was starting to think about it, I was still working for my parents' business. I played hooky to go chase Union Pacific, I want to say 844, one of their larger steam engines because they were running it through the valley on an excursion. I was just like, "We should just name everything after trains," because all the car names had already been taken.
There's a few exceptions. Banshee is actually what the original name for the Pontiac Firebird was. Pontiac thought that naming something that means "screaming death" in Gaelic was a bad idea because the first time someone got killed in one, it would write its own headline. I don't think anyone's gonna die from a Banshee guitar, hopefully, so we're good there. It seemed fitting for that.
There is one that is a Simpsons joke: Arcturus, which is a model we used to make. It's from my favorite Simpsons episode with Hank Scorpio and "Project Arcturus," the name for his criminal plot to take over the world. We were jokingly calling that thing "Project Arcturus" and the name just kind of stuck.
Among your catalog of custom guitars, players can find past examples of guitar finishes inspired by everything from Star Wars to The Simpsons to vaporwave to '90s Jazz plastic cups. When it comes to finishes, is anything fair game?
Yes and no. Some of these are customer orders, like some of the Star Wars ones. Usually, the best approach is a loosely pitched idea. Like, "I know this is dumb, but could you make a Korona painted like Han Solo's pants?" I didn’t know that was a specific thing, I had to Google it.
It's kind of one of those things of whenever inspiration strikes. I have to give huge credit to Josh in the last two or three years, we have been sending each other messages all day on Instagram about all the other weird things we're into where we see ideas. "Could we do this? Do you think we could pull this off?"
We get a lot of credit for things we do that were definitely customer ideas first. So, sometimes, if you hit the right chord with me at the right time, we can make it happen. There's a few times where we're like, "I get what you're getting at, I don't know if I can pull it off," so we try to be pretty honest about it.
Of all the guitar shows Kauer has attended, why was the Holy Grail Guitar Show in Berlin the best one?
Oh man, well. Berlin and Montreal are the two best ones. The reason Berlin is slightly better is because, well was better, that show started as a discussion among builders at the last Montreal Guitar Show. That was the gold standard of what they wanted to achieve.
Montreal did have the advantage of that it was part of the Jazz Festival up there, so it was a fun week to be up there. It also has the advantage of not being a thirteen-hour flight. Holy Grail was pretty awesome, though. Holy Grail also has the distinction though of I got to do it twice, and then COVID killed it the third time I was going to do it.
The first time I did it, we got a bunch of free publicity that I didn't get to cash in on until the next time we were there because all my guitars made it to Berlin the day I stepped on the plane on Tuesday and then stayed in a customs warehouse three kilometers from the show and never made it to the show. So, we walked out to set up the table and no guitars were there. Once I calmed down, I won't lie that I was a little upset, Tonya, who was the main organizer, just moved heaven and Earth trying to get those things for us, couldn't do it, then printed pictures of what we were going to bring and put them out with a sign in German: "Stuck in customs."
So, it was kind of funny to watch people walk by and laugh and say "Oh, that sucks," or whatever the German equivalent of that is.
Two years later when we were back there again, everybody knew who we were. "You were the guy who got stuck in customs!" You know, that might actually have worked out, like as the long con. It was a pretty good marketing move, I guess? It was fun, that was a really good event.
Is there any artist you'd like to shout out that we should check out to see a Kauer electric guitar in action?
What's crazy about where we are, I love Sacramento, I love my town. I love it here, I lived in a couple other places, but we really love it here, grew up here. Downside is we're not necessarily the big music stopover town. It's changing, it's getting better.
For not being L.A., Nashville, New York, the artists who play our guitars that we have, it's ridiculous. We've been so fortunate. Scott Holiday from Rival Sons, obviously is our biggest go-to, because Scott is a genuine best friend. We are nerds of the same type; we've been working together for at least ten years now. It's amazing, they're a band you absolutely have to go see.
We got lucky, for three shows before Steven Tyler blew his voice out, we got Brad Whitford, he picked up a Banshee. Angie Swan is a great friend of ours. It's like the Where's Waldo? of guitar players and Kauers. We've been on Dick Clark's New Year's Eve with her, we were in the Joker movie playing an Electroliner. She's in the current season of Hacks playing her Electroliner, like it's just weird, it's just randomly awesome and weird.
You've shared a great story about crafting a couple of guitars utilizing the bed wood of your grandfather's 1964 Chevrolet C10 pickup truck. Can you recount the experience of working on those guitars for us?
(Gesturing) Behind me, this is my '64 Chevy. That was my grandfather's truck; I'm the third owner at this point. It was silver originally, he paid his friend twenty-five bucks to paint it green, it's definitely a twenty-five-dollar paint job, but it's my absolute favorite thing.
The beds in those old trucks were wood, they had metal sides but a wood floor. It was all pretty rotted out, but it had been painted with like, house paint, like latex paint green. Typically the beds were oak, but when I pulled that apart to redo it, it was pine, and I was able to do, based on the old Gretsch country westerns with cowboy inlays, a pair of Super Chiefs: one for me and one for my dad. It was my dad's dad's truck.
I was able to get three-piece tops out of some sections and it was neat because the bottoms were just raw to the elements so it just picked up streaking and oil and everything like that. They turned out really cool. They're really special to me.
What would you like to say to the Russo Music community who may be learning about Kauer Guitars for the first time?
I hope if you're finding us for the first time in the store: Some of the downsides to (selling through a) dealer, being at the store level, is that you don't realize there's like six of us here. It's funny to me when I get people who call the shop and are like, "Am I really talking to Doug?" I'm like, "Yeah, I'm the only one who picks up the phone here," besides me and Jackie, but most times it's me.
It's a small little shop, we make the best thing we can possibly make with the resources that we have and the best guitar you can buy from us is the one we make tomorrow, hopefully, or made today, at least. We stand behind the stuff we make, we just want to make that little improvement every time.
What's next for Kauer Guitars?
I don't know...
Kauer Burgers?
Yeah, maybe. The running joke is all the names work over, too.
My wife spent the pandemic getting healthy and riding a stationary. I spent the pandemic working on a burger recipe, because that's a great use of time and resources and my health. The joke would be if we waited to open a burger shop it would be: Starliner's the single, Super Chief's the double, Banshee's the spicy one. Maybe? I don't know.
There's a couple things in the works. I don’t ever really know because I'm not smart enough to think far enough ahead, I guess. We typically bring something "new" new out every three to five years, so like, Gripen was the big new one, and then Draken, the bass version of it, was this year, so that'll probably ride for a while.
I have something we're dabbling on that may or may not be alive by the time this becomes a video, it's a long ways to go to make a My Cousin Vinny joke, that's all I'll say for now. We'll see. I don't know if it'll be a full-time thing or something that satisfies our own curiosity of wanting to make something that we've always liked or our version of something we've always liked. I don't know (laughs).
We've made a career out of knowing a baseline knowledge of three digital programs and hacking our way through and falling kind of ass-backwards into success for a lot of things.
I don't know. I like seeing where the universe takes me.
