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Guitars' revival forged in metal

For "death metal" bands, Halo's custom instruments convey just the right attitude.

CUPERTINO, Calif. - There aren't too many mean-looking things in Cupertino, a sleepy Silicon Valley haunt of Apple employees.

But there's something gruesome growing in one corner of town: Halo Custom Guitars Inc.

Fueled by a resurgence in heavy metal music and its numerous subgenres, Halo makes and sells instruments with bodies carved to resemble rotting flesh, distended eyeballs and bone. The guitars primarily find their way into the hands of death-metal musicians.

Regular heavy metal music covers the usual topics of scorn and despair, while death metal leans heavily on growled vocals and themes such as Satanism and dark mythology.

Both are an important niche for electric guitar manufacturers like 5-year-old Halo. It sold 200 guitars its first year in business and now sells 200 to 300 a month in direct sales and another 200 per month to dealers, said co-founder Waylon Ford.

"Ever since we started making more outrageous designs, we started selling more guitars," he said. "We really owe a lot to the metal genre."

Street teams of Halo guitar players and hangers-on keep the company's buzz alive across the country, posting links to their favorite Halo-using bands on their MySpace pages and posting images of the lithesome Halo Gals, young models that appear in ads wearing little more than undergarments.

More established guitarmakers are taking notice of metal's rebirth. B.C. Rich Guitars boasts an aggressive-looking lineup that includes the "Warlock" and "Dagger."

Ford takes his designs to the extreme, and his guitars boast names such as "Satyr," Hellfire," and "Fallen Angel." The headstock, where tuning pegs adjust string tension, looks like a horned profile of Lucifer himself.

The niche guitars fill a void that your regular old Fender Strat or Gibson Les Paul won't. Those standard guitars look out of place in the hands of a growling 20-year-old lead metal guitarist wearing black nail polish and white face paint, screaming into a microphone about Norse mythology, a favorite theme of many metal practitioners.

As for his mean guitar designs, Ford put it simply.

"Some people like skulls," he said.

[Last modified August 28, 2007, 01:31:58]