We’ve broken down the history of Arium, how it was developed, and what it is. How do we go about crafting a guitar out of it?

1) Creating an exoskeleton:
This is an outer layer consisting of different topcoats for sanding and construction and multiple layers of glass fibre and carbon which are locally inserted. The exoskeleton creates a hollow guitar and is necessary for construction stiffness and durability. The great challenge is to make the guitar stiff, but not too stiff. When it is too stiff you’ll have great sustain but no warmth in the tone. We want both. So, it all starts with the outer layer which is about a day’s work. This results for the highest standard in both tone and durability.

2) The core is made with Arium. For a quick review: this is a scientifically developed ideal tone material with clear sound, good sustain, warmth and beautiful character in tone. We take great pride in ensuring the build quality of our guitars, but the material itself plays a huge role in tone as well. Arium is made out of different resins and solid additives to create a relatively light and liquid material that is injected into the exoskeleton. The end result is a mixture of resins and particles that creates millions of tiny sound chambers that can resonate freely in all three dimensions.

The complete process of building a body is done manually using an aluminium custom made mold to define the detailed forms of the Aristides Guitars. It takes 8 hours for a luthier to work on one guitar body. During the day he will consistently build up different layers to construct the final outer layer of the guitar. In essence we first create a hollow guitar which is filled all the way from the bottom to the headstock with the homogeneous Arium core material to get a solid body guitar.

To ensure the proper results the guitars are hardened in the molds while being tilted at an angle to control the air flow through the guitar during filling. The filling is done with a custom made pneumatic pump for a consistent filling process.

The next day the guitar is released from the mold. Every guitar is checked visually, acoustically and is weighed. This results in perfect consistency of build, guitar to guitar. When approved, the body is cured twice in a heated climate chamber to achieve the final desired tonal characteristics.

​The Aristides factory is based in a beautiful renovated old machinery factory. This embodies the Aristides mantra of traditional pride in work and modern design appointments.

After the body is formed, frets, hardware, and electronics are added. Many state of the art custom devices are used for this, including a proprietary aluminum neck jig that takes playing position, string tension, and more into account.

Guitars are quality controlled by master luthiers at every step in the process. This is documented in a scannable chip (essentially a high tech serial number) inside the guitar, that tracks all information about the birth of an Aristides Guitar, and is attached to that customer’s account for easy access in the future, should any information need to be found.