About

THE STORY OF TERUYA GUITARS

GROWING UP IN HAWAII

Before we can get to the story of Teruya Guitars, I have to explain how I started playing guitar in the first place.

I grew up in Hawaii, and in Hawaii they teach you ukulele in elementary and middle school. It's a cool instrument; it just wasn't the one I related to. I picked music classes partly because it seemed like an easy credit, and I remember sitting there learning chords and feeling nothing. Then I heard a song with a ukulele solo, and something about it connected. Strumming chords wasn't doing anything for me, but a solo was a different story. The only problem was I didn't connect with Hawaiian music, so even though I was drawn in by that moment, it didn't hold me for long.

Then some of my friends in middle school started getting into metal, and the moment I heard it, I was completely enveloped. The distortion, the tuning, the angry riffs, all of it felt like exactly what I'd been waiting for without knowing I was waiting. I begged my parents until they got me a little Squire Strat starter pack with a small amp, and I got good at it fast. My parents were incredibly supportive; as I progressed they kept helping me get slightly better instruments. I never took a lesson. I learned by ear and by reading tabs, playing for hours every single day.

My dad's cousin was a guitarist too, a big Van Halen guy. He bought me my first two guitar CDs: Van Halen's Greatest Hits and Metallica's Black Album. I listened to both every single day. I was trying to learn "Enter Sandman" like everybody else my age, and "Eruption" felt completely beyond the realm of what a human being could do. Then came the moment that changed everything.

THE KID AT THE MUSIC STORE

The summer before I entered high school, I was at the local mall in Maui. There was one music store on the island, and it had been temporarily relocated there. As I walked by, I heard someone absolutely ripping on a guitar. I ran in. There was a kid, maybe 14 or 15, playing what I would later find out was "Master of Puppets." That riff is influential for so many people, and hearing it played that well, at that age, rewired something in my brain. I talked to him and found out he was going to the same high school I was about to attend.

The day I walked into that store changed my life. Because what I understood in that moment was that it was possible for someone to be young and play well. I started actively seeking out guitarists who were better than me, jamming with them so I could absorb everything I could. People would call me to go to the beach and I'd turn them down because I was home trying to learn how to shred.

A SINGLE PAGE IN A MAGAZINE

As I got better, I wanted better guitars. They were out of reach financially, so I did the next best thing: I went to the bookstore every month and read every guitar magazine I could find, lusting over expensive guitars and daydreaming about what it would be like to own my dream guitar someday. Sometimes I even bought a magazine.

One fateful day I came across a single page article on a luthier who had built two guitars. I can still see them in my head; really unique double-cutaway shapes, one purple and one gold. I'm still determined to find that page someday. I think I tore it out and saved it somewhere. Because that one page is where Teruya Guitars actually began. I had no idea it was possible to build your own guitar until the day I read that article. I think I was 15 or 16 when I made this discovery. I had a strong art background and loved to draw, so it clicked immediately: I could design guitars. I started sketching them constantly, refining shapes, adjusting proportions. It came naturally in a way that nothing really had before. Everything I saw was close to what I wanted, but not quite right. I wanted to design something a little different, and I had ideas about what that should look like.

So I ordered a book on guitar building. It came in the mail. I read through it. The only problem was I had no woodworking skills and essentially zero tools; my dad had a beat-up hand sander and not much else.

UNCLE WALLY AND MY FIRST GUITAR

I told my parents how badly I wanted to build a guitar, and it turned out that a man at our church named Uncle Wally was a carpenter and craftsman who turned beautiful wooden bowls. My dad asked him if he'd teach me.  Uncle Wally read through the book and said he could show me how to do it, because he had the skills and the tools: routers, drill press, planer, etc. I bought a premade neck because building one from scratch required specialized equipment I didn't have, and then I bought a body blank, drew my design on it in pencil, and took it to Uncle Wally's shop. He gave me a crash course in safety and  showed me how to use a bandsaw to cut the shape and how to use all the other tools I needed. My mind was like a sponge absorbing everything I could.

On a trip to Oahu to visit family, my parents took me to a Woodcraft store and bought me a set of Swiss chisels that I still have today. At the time it was probably $125, and I felt like they were really investing in me. I went home and hand-carved all the contours with a mallet, those chisels, a rasp, sandpaper, and a crappy sander.

For the finish, I got lucky. Our old neighbor had a body shop, and his painter agreed to take on my guitar as a little side project. He sprayed primer, then taught me to wet-sand it flat to 600 grit while I stood in the shop next to a bucket of water. When it was smooth enough, I asked him if he could do white with a blue pearl finish. He said yes. I ended up with this gorgeous finish, on my first guitar.

For the wiring, my youth pastor knew electronics and he installed the pickups in for me. I had an EMG 81/85 set just like all the metal guys did back then. After it was all wired up, I set it up, plugged it into an old Line 6 Bean, and played it. That feeling was unlike anything I had experienced before. I had something nobody else in the world had. It was completely mine. I didn't even understand scale length at that point; I think I guessed where the bridge should go, and I guessed close but not close enough to ever intonate correctly. But I was hooked. Immediately, I wanted to build another one.

The second guitar had a flame maple top, a korina back, and another premade neck. Uncle Wally helped me again. It was more complicated, gluing up a top and back and working through the mistakes I'd made the first time, but it came out much better. My youth pastor wired that one too. I did the staining on the flame maple top and Uncle Wally taught me how to spray finish. It came out really nice for the time.

For my senior art project, I convinced my teacher to let me build a guitar. That one is probably the worst guitar I've ever built; the spray can paint job was rough, the sound wasn't great, but I had designed it, and I had built it.

Right before I left Hawaii for California, I built one more. I'd been refining a particular body shape since I was 15, and this was the third iteration of it. I went back to the neighbor's body shop, and this time we did gold flake. He was a car painter, so he knew what he was doing. He called me after taking the guitar home, a couple of beers in, just ripping on it, telling me it was badass. I was so happy he got to do that.

CALIFORNIA

When I moved to California I wasn't building, but I had found a new obsession: Allan Holdsworth. I was chasing his tone and technique relentlessly, which led me to buy his signature headless guitar. It was so much smaller than a standard guitar, but it somehow felt easier to play; there was less guitar in the way of my playing.

I also had access to a huge selection of gear for the first time via craigslist and all the music stores in LA, so I also began building an amp collection. A friend of mine was a huge Mesa Boogie guy and really walked me through setting up a rig. At the time I had a full wet dry stereo rig with rack unit effects and pedals. I would load up my gear in the back of my little red Toyota pickup and drive to his apartment in The Valley where we would lug a whole rack up 3 flights of stairs to work on into the wee hours of the night.

During this period I was trying really hard to get a job at a famous guitar shop; a really beautiful small operation in the Thousand Oaks area. Even though he had no openings, the owner was incredibly generous with his time, showed me around the shop, and answered my questions. When I asked him if there was anything he would have done differently, he told me that the hardest part of running a guitar company is that at a certain point, you stop building guitars and start running a business. He said he really missed building. That stuck with me for the rest of my career and shaped how I think about what I'm building now.

Eventually I came across a job listing looking for guitar builders. I sent my resume and photos of my guitars and landed an interview at what turned out to be a major classical guitar company. My boss there, had an engineer's mind and had trained under a genuinely famous classical builder. That shop didn't have a CNC; everything was done with handmade jigs. I learned how to bend sides, glue backs, prep and brace tops, and bind guitars the old-school way. The pay wasn't great, but it was a free education, and I came home every day smelling like wood, feeling like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

One of the perks of working there was shop access for personal projects. I started building my own guitars again. I also started going to NAMM, which felt like a dream, until the third time when I was completely over the sonic assault. But it was at NAMM that I walked into the basement floor, where all the interesting stuff lives, and met Ola Strandberg from Strandberg Guitars. I played the endurneck design he had developed, talked to him, and got really inspired. The headless guitar world owes Ola a lot; he revived headless guitars for everybody and opened the doors for luthiers like me.

At the time, the endurneck profile was open source. You could buy the full-size plans for around $75. I don't know CAD and I still don't, so I printed it life-size, traced it, and built my first headless guitar using that neck design. The body design was the first iteration of what would eventually become the Endurance. Ola later patented the design, and sent the most gracious email asking people to stop using it. That was completely fair. But building that neck taught me a lot about ergonomics and shaped some of my build philosophy.

MOVING TO INDIANA

During this time I married Karrah and were living in Oxnard with her aunt and uncle since that was all we could afford. She suggested that we move to Indian so I could build a guitar company. California was way too expensive. She was moving up in her career but decided to leave it behind for me. We moved to her hometown and started over.

I got a job in the RV industry building cabinets in a factory. The pay was good for blue-collar work, both of us were working, we had no kids, and rent was cheap. We were newlyweds, had some money and were renting a house with a big garage. I told Karrah I'd slowly buy tools and set up a shop. She looked at me and said, "Why are you going to do it slowly? Just buy them all." I said that would be about $20,000. She said so what, we'll pay it off. When your wife gives you the greenlight, you don't argue. I went on a shopping spree, set up the shop, and got to work.

I woke up at 3:30 every morning for my factory job, came home exhausted, and then built guitars. My first customer was my friend Joey, who runs a custom surfboard company in Maui with his wife Tiana. He ordered a bass, and it came out really well; I built another bass for another friend, then started building guitars. Some were prototypes, some were for myself, some were for sale. I built five or six and brought them to a guitar show in Illinois with a friend who had a background in music sales. We stayed at a hotel, ordered beers before the show opened to get loose, and worked two days on the floor. People came back. There was real interest. I felt like something was starting.

The problem was I didn't know how to run a business. I knew how to make guitars. The follow-through, the sales, the Instagram, the follow-up; I didn't have the tools for any of it. So I kept building, mostly for myself, not sure how to make any of it stick.

And then Karrah got diagnosed with leukemia.

LEUKEMIA

Karrah’s diagnosis threw a wrench into everything. I became a caregiver. We lived three hours north of Indianapolis; she was getting treatment there, one of the better facilities in the state. We made that drive multiple times a month, sometimes more. I kept my factory job as long as I could, but eventually the demands of caregiving made it impossible. Karrah's brother ran an accounting firm and brought me on as a bookkeeper. I worked remotely, handled books for several companies, some of them quite large, and got an education in business I couldn't have paid for in a classroom. That turned out to be the final piece of the puzzle.

Karrah told me more than once, during her treatment, that she knew if she died, my dreams of becoming a successful guitar maker would finally happen. That's hard to hear. But she believed in me completely, from the very beginning, and she showed it every time.

She passed away in August 2025.

GRIEF

The grief was devastating in a way that the word grief doesn't really cover. But she had pulled me into so many healthy practices over the years; therapy, meditation, the work of being present with other people. I leaned hard on all of it. I made sure to be around family and friends as much as I could. I kept my head above water.

The day after she passed, I knew I needed to build a guitar to honor her. I didn't have a name for it yet. But I knew I had to build it before I could build anything else. The idea came quickly: I would inlay her ashes into the headstock and her wedding ring into the fretboard. I captured only one moment of the build on film, the inlay itself. The rest of the process was too personal, too painful. I didn't want a camera anywhere near me.

MY LIFE CHANGES OVERNIGHT

I put together a short video. I was averaging a few thousand views on a good day and had been stuck trying to break 1,900 followers. The first video got around 7,000 views, more than I usually saw, and I felt momentum, so I cut a second one from the footage of the inlay.

Within 48 hours it had 2 million views.

As of the day I am writing this, that video is sitting at 10.1 million views and over a million likes. My following went from 1,900 to more than 28,000 overnight. And the only reason any of it happened is because of Karrah's love.

I started drawing guitars when I was 14 or 15 years old. I'm 39 now and just beginning to see the fruits of my labor. That's a long time to carry a dream. I'm still not where I want to be, but for the first time it feels like the real story is just beginning. I was dreaming too small for too long. Teruya Guitars has taken on a meaning I couldn't have predicted. It's not just about guitars. There's a whole lot more to the story, and I can't wait to write the next chapters with all of you.