Our Instrument Origins

Gold Tone is (and has always been) committed to providing our customers with the highest-quality instruments at prices anyone can afford. We build all of our custom-designed products using solidly-made parts assembled with care. Each instrument receives a thorough twelve-point set-up in our Florida facility by people that actually PLAY them. Wayne and Robyn Rogers continuously strive to give you "more bang for your buck" at every price point. All Gold Tone instruments are designed and their prototypes built by Wayne Rogers and his team of skilled luthiers at the Gold Tone facility in Titusville, Florida. Their goal is always to design instruments that will have properly-fitting parts, and that play perfectly. Prototypes are often sent to some of our dealers and to artists around the world for evaluation. This valuable input helps us to develop the best possible instrument for the most affordable price.

We have long-term relationships with our manufacturing partners. The factories we work with specialize in making the types of instruments we offer, BUT EVERY GOLD TONE PRODUCT IS AN ORIGINAL DESIGN. While most US nameplates sell instruments that are mostly archetypical mass-market products ordered from huge factories at Pacific Rim trade shows, Gold Tone’s designs are one hundred percent OURS and are NOT available from any other source.

We PLAY the instruments that we sell, so you’ll want to play them, too.

The final blueprints for each product are sent to one of our partner factories in China and Korea. The majority of instruments produced by Gold Tone are manufactured in a Korean owned-and-managed factory in China that we’ve worked with since 1993, when Gold Tone was founded. We use maple from the US and Canada, rosewood and ebony from Africa and Indonesia and blackwood from Australia. Most of our metal parts come from Korea, as well as from China, the US and Germany.

Parts are parts. It’s what you DO with them that matters most. Chuck Levy wrote in Banjo Newsletter (September, 2010):

“Gold Tone employs a dedicated staff that assembles, inspects, adjusts, and attends to each instrument before it is shipped. While this is easy to state, it is something else to see in action. I spent a day at the new Gold Tone headquarters at 3656 South Hopkins Avenue and was very impressed with what I saw. Gold Tone moved from a 3,000 square foot facility to the new building, a completely renovated 14,000 square foot (previously a warehouse) in 2009. It turns out that 14,000 square feet is big! Imagine your high school gymnasium. Now multiply it by a couple of times. Since the building was renovated at Wayne’s direction, everything is laid out from the loading dock to the storage room, from the well-lit work benches with their tools hanging from the pegboards, to the shelves behind with row after row of parts, to the dowel rods affixed to the back wall adorned with rims of various sizes, to allow the efficient flow of instruments to circulate from arrival, to inspection, set-up, and delivery to dealers across the country and throughout the world. At the work bench, the staff is busy with a variety of instruments. At one bench, frets are being dressed, while at the next a nut is being filed. At a third, the spider and cone of a resonator guitar is being installed, while at the next bench a custom order to install a graphite neck of a 1920’s Vega Electric rim is being carried out. Robyn is on the floor conducting the final inspections and packaging, while Wayne is answering a question regarding the disposition of a certain instrument. The atmosphere is business-like (after all, this is a business). Movements have been honed to the essentials, and work is moving along. The front office is much the same. People are working at their desks, updating the website, taking orders, giving information. If you call Gold Tone, you are answered by an actual person.” The parts and instruments are assembled and setup when your local Gold Tone dealer calls to place their orders. It generally takes a few days to give your new instrument the special care required to provide you with a product that will outlast our lifetime warranty policy and sound worlds above what you actually paid for it.”