From Left to Right: Dave Grohl Playing his Dan Armstrong Acrilic guitar during the All My Life Foo FIghters VIdeo. Dave Anthony Playing his Gallo Guitar during Nemes' performance at The Great Scott In Boston.
I still remember that day when I first saw Dave Grohl’s guitar on the Foo Fighter’s’ All My Life video about 15 years ago. His Dan Armstrong acrylic guitar was so awesome and captivating, that after all that time of having seen their video on MTV for the first time, it flashed back into my head as I dreamt about making my first builds.
If we go back to when I was a kid, music was seen and distributed in a very different way. We didn’t have access to the internet until I was a teenager, so my only access to music were MTV, VH1 and the bands that my friends would tell me about. This obviously included all the Top 10 shows on tv and that’s how I became a huge fan of, as you may already know, bands like Coldplay, Blink 182, Green Day and Foo Fighters.
If we fast forward to 2014, which was the very first year I started making guitars, there were a lot of things going on. While I was building a 3D printed guitar for a class project, I was still frustrated about the technology not being there yet, but had the will to create something completely new. That’s why, as soon as I finished classes I scraped the concept I had been working on for 6 months and started over again to create something that I really loved.
During that summer, the goal was one: To make a guitar that took the best from all worlds and that I could easily reproduce. I wanted to keep the LEDs on the guitar, but I wanted to simplify the wiring and construction methods because they were very time consuming. After wrestling a lot with different Ideas, I was finally able to come up with something that I loved. I still don’t remember how I thought about Dave Grohl’s guitar back then, but I do remember that I was listening to a lot of Foo FIghters songs at the time.
Nevertheless, the truly important part is that the idea came to me, and that I decided to embrace it and evolve it to create something new. I played around with materials and different compositions, util it evolved to that guitar that I was dreaming about that one day.
Now, after almost four years of having started Gallo Guitars, I keep looking back and wondering what it is about Dave Grohl’s guitar that was so captivating in the first place. In my opinion It’s gotta do a lot with the lighting on that video, but most importantly it's about the edge that Dave Grohl had to use a plexiglas guitar which, just like Rock n’ Roll, was completely going against the norm.
– Jose Gallo –