There has to be a first one of everything. It is difficult to convey the sense of relief we all felt getting the first Ridgewing guitar done and packed, and it worked, and it sounded good. The customer was an attorney from California who ordered Serial #1 a year or two previously when the Ridgewing guitar was pretty much just a concept for improving on the Chrysalis guitar. His pre-order had the effect of elevating the Ridgewing from an art project where the sky was the limit to a job to get done, which was critical in keeping us focused. Every decision made during the build would be important to a customer first, not us. It took, about five months of design, create molds, build, fail, redesign, make new molds, rebuild, fail in a different way, design, build…… etc., pretty much living the entrepreneur dream – broke and on fire. The money flowing into payroll and materials during this time had to be viewed as something like Monopoly money, else it would hurt too much to think about. I simply put pedal to metal in every maximum way I could think of so that later, at the end of the ride, no matter how it turned out, I would know with certainty that I could not have done more.

The customer for #1 really liked his instrument. He told us that as an attorney he couldn’t bring a regular guitar along on business trips because a client might see him with it in a hotel lobby, and have doubts. Now he could walk around clients and sit through meetings with cool confidence that everyone was thinking he must be especially diligent to carry two attaché cases, without anyone having a clue that in one of them he was packing a guitar so strange and wonderful that, if revealed, would create a local reality distortion field, bring all productive activity to a halt, and make lower jaws suddenly heavy. The common entrepreneurial concept of “disruptive technology” is so cerebral and weak in the knees compared to this guitar’s old-school “disruptive”. You just take it out, put it together, point it, and watch things disrupt.