Casimi Guitars

The Casimi story starts in two places at once. Matthew Rice was working as the in-house guitar tech at a Cape Town music shop, dissatisfied with how often the guitars passing through his hands felt like wasted design opportunities — "all the essential ingredients of a great design," he says, "but so often there is something missing or something that could have been done with more care." On lunch breaks he sketched what guitars could be if you started over from the form. Matthias Roux had taken a more direct path into building, apprenticing straight out of high school at Maingard Guitars in Cape Town and completing roughly 250 builds there alongside fellow Maingard luthier Colin Rock. The two had known each other since childhood. When Roux and Rock began offering an evening guitar-building course at Maingard, Rice arrived with his sketchbook. The prototype that came out of those evenings — Rice's personal guitar, built with no commercial intention at all — became the C2S, and the C2S became the foundation for everything Casimi has built since. Casimi guitars carry an unusual amount of visible thinking. Every bridge is pinless, secured by a magnet-held cap covering a keyhole system Rice designed to keep the string anchor underneath the bridge plate — preserving the energy-transfer advantages of a traditional pinned bridge while eliminating the mid-show string-change indignity Rice spent years cursing. The bridge's shape mirrors the guitar's tail curve to spread tension evenly across the lower soundboard. The hollow slotted headstock is a traditional slotted shape with the center spar removed, reinforced internally by carbon-fibre rods, with sideways-mounted Gotoh 510 tuners that ease restringing. Inside the body, a lattice bracing pattern Roux developed over several years of experimentation gives Casimi guitars their distinctive midrange — what Roux describes as "thick creamy mids," explicitly contrary to the scoop a Martin X-brace tends to leave in that frequency range. None of this is bolted onto an existing template; the form was developed in Cape Town in relative isolation from the mainstream of modern guitar design, and every choice has both an aesthetic and a functional rationale. The materials are extraordinary by design. Roux selects Quilted Mahogany from The Tree (the legendary Honduran tree harvested in the 1960s), African Blackwood, Hawaiian Koa, and African wengé for inner sides; soundboards come from Alpine spruce harvested at the lunar low-sap point in a European luthier tradition borrowed from violin-making; necks are hand-carved from aged Central American mahogany. Rice's inlay work — every rosette, backstrip, and headstock detail cut by hand — incorporates gold, silver, bronze, mother of pearl, and abalone alongside figured woods like painted maple and Mahogany from The Tree itself. No CNC is used anywhere in the process. A single Casimi takes the two-person team roughly two and a half months to build, with annual output in the range of ten instruments. Each guitar is one-of-a-kind. Casimi instruments are carried at a very limited number of dealers on the Atlas — the combination of low annual output, a global collector base, and the price tier keeps active inventory rare. Guy Buttery was among the earliest commissions, and a quiet international fingerstyle community has followed. Stock turns over slowly enough that an in-stock Casimi is a notable event.