Creating Duplicates

Our long "Obon" holiday is now over, and we are back in the swing of things here at the office.

One of the things we get common requests for is "creating duplicates". This includes everything from exact replicas of various artist's signature models to the Les Paul that Jimmy Page used on a particular piece of footage.

Though we have made various "replicas" of other company's models in the past, things around our industry have changed quite significantly as of very recently.

A lot of the major companies in our industry have become increasingly noting of the amount of smaller companies out there making replicas of their models, and making a good living that way- while they themselves seem to be not selling as many guitars as they used to. This has everything to do from the possible price of certain instruments right down to a difference in quality. Whatever each individual company's reasons may be- the outcome is the same; they have made it clear that they will no longer stand aside and allow copies of their instruments to be made by other companies.

The only way around this is to pay a particular company, we'll call a "guarantee", to allow us to build a copy of one of their instruments. As a very small business, personally, we simply can in no way accomplish this.

Getting to the signature model issue; this is just not even up for argument. For obvious legal reasons, both on the part of the said manufacturer, as well as the artist in question, creating a copy of an artist's signature model is in no way possible, whatsoever.

Believe me, it has nothing to do with pride. It's not like we are just trying to force our own models on our customers. If we could get away with building anything we wanted, our orders for guitars would more than triple, and thus so would our income!

We are extremely flattered that we get so much positive feedback on the quality of our instruments, and as a business the last thing you want to do is turn a potential customer away; but the reality is that we really cannot build replicas of another company's instrument any longer.

We have always, from the inception of the company, prided ourselves on (as well as having the strict company policy as) being a CUSTOM ORDER MADE guitar and bass manufacturer. We love building instruments hand-made. We love being able to deliver exactly what our customers want. This is the most cherished core of Combat Guitars, and it will never change. We will always build each and every instrument custom order made. Though we can no longer create duplicates of another company's patented model, we can still take your ideas and turn them into something fantastic. Something original. Something of superior quality, and superior sound.

Combat also has a few original models that we are very proud of. The 4 most popular I have blogged about in the past, as well as posted galleries of on our MySpace page.

They are; the ST-Warm Series, the TL-Warm Series, the Type-G Series and the LT-Series.

Check out my blog post on them HERE.

CLICK HERE to see photo galleries of all of our original models as well as an array of custom guitars and basses we have built in the past.

I hope that helped to clear up the "creating duplicates" issue.

Thanks for your understanding!

-Combat Colin.