Skate Guitars – A Tale of Trash and Treasure

Read Time 2 Minutes

The Future of Broken Skateboards

From Buenos Aires hails a luthier like few others. One who takes someone else’s trash and converts it into treasure. Treasure that can be plugged into an amp and pounded away on. Ezequiel Galasso and professional skateboarder Gianfranco de Gennaro Gilmour have come together with the sole intention of fusing old skateboards together with guitar parts to make fully playable instruments. It’s a bit more accessible of an idea and a sight more pragmatic than building a guitar out of a car engine, and the results are pretty damn impressive.

Each guitar is hand built out of at least two skateboards that make up the neck and body. After years of use these guitars still show off their relic scratches, dents, nicks, and cuts like old war scars that brag about how they’ve been there and done that. Thin as the bodies are – skateboards are designed to put up with a lot of abuse considering they generally have 160 pounds (give or take) slamming down on them, making them a good alternative for an instrument.

The guitars are built with layered maple and are armed with any kind of pickup, pots, bridges, or whammy bars one might prefer. Of course a Floyd Rose might not be so convenient to install, but some of these do support Bigsby tremolos quite well. For the attention that goes into these guitars the asking price really isn’t that bad. Only $1,000 a pop plus shipping costs. While I haven’t played one personally I cannot speak on behalf of the feel of one, but that’s still recognizably a competitive price for any guitar off a factory line, let alone one that was pieced together by hand.

If you want to hear one of these guitars in action here’s your big chance. This video features guitarist Lucio Balduini playing one of these smaller sized guitars. The sound is surprisingly effective for jazz tones.

More From Galasso

While the Skate Guitars are getting ever more attention they aren’t the only things that Ezequiel Galasso has conjured up. A lot of his other guitars include completely hand built guitars from sleek double necks some boxy looking hollow bodies. And then there are guitars like his Leaf model. The acousticish-looking electric that sometimes sounds acoustic and other times sounds electric.

While researching Galasso’s guitars hasn’t been as easy as some of the other topics we’ve covered – not since nearly every resource I’ve come across has been written in Spanish and my Spanish is nonexistent at best – I have nevertheless extrapolated that Eqequiel has been building guitars for decades and while simply building guitars is fine, innovating guitars is an equally important part of the job for him, and it shows in his design and craftsmanship.