Aristides Factory Tour – 2024
Can you believe it’s been 5 years since our last factory tour? Yep, all the way back in 2019 I walked you through our (then) new factory, but since then a lot has changed. 5 years means a lot of new models released, robot upgrades implemented, & coffee consumed here in Haarlem, so it felt appropriate to give you a fresh update.
I think what I’m most excited to share is the human element behind Aristides Guitars. We implement as much technology & as many new systems as we can to create the most consistent, durable, & efficient to build guitars possible, & you’ll see a lot of those on display here! However, at the end of the day it always comes down to skilled luthiers spending a huge amount of time on every single guitar.
Whether you’re already a super-fan or learning about Aristides for the first time, there’s going to be some great info in here for you. We start at the mold & end with a finished guitar ready to ship to its new home, all while addressing the most common questions we get about our production process. So thank you for watching, I’m excited to hear what you think! – Pascal
This Aristides Factory tour is part of a continuing series of mini-docs, so make sure to subscribe for more behind the scenes footage.
The Full Story
Doing More.
The improvements we make every year in the shop help us make incredibly consistent guitars so every Aristides customer gets a 10/10 guitar & experience… but they also help us build more guitars! As demand for Aristides increases, we invest in systems that help us build quicker without sacrificing quality. The 2024 Aristides Factory Tour goes behind the scenes on topics like our batched Raw model production to keep build times down, our process for working with customers on full-custom options, & more.
Our Partners.
We work with the best partners in the industry to deliver the high performance Aristides Guitars are known for, especially when we need something custom-designed specifically for our models. Bare Knuckle Pickups & Lundgren Pickups both make custom pickups that exactly fit our multiscale slants, Quantum Industries provides all of our cases for safe transport & Stringjoy supplies a huge variety of custom gauges for our customers to choose from, which is especially helpful for our multiscale & extended range models. We also work closely with both Hantug Guitars & EverTune on our hardware. It was fun highlighting all of these companies that help us do what we do best in this walkthrough video.
Robo-Power!
When we first purchased our robot arm, we very conservatively applied it to specific parts of the guitar building process to reduce the amount of manual labor required for certain menial tasks. It’s not that we didn’t trust it, it’s just that… well yes, we didn’t trust it to do a lot of the tougher jobs we’re used to doing by hand! We’re perfectionists. However, we invested in it for a reason – it’s a very powerful & precise tool. Over time we’ve set it up to do more & more. The robot arm, along with our CNC machine, handles some routing, & it now even helps with the sanding process! I think the robot & I are slowly coming to an understanding, even if it is a little frightening how good it’s getting.


