Due to the exposure of several Dana Westone custom guitars on Ebay I think it is time to tell the story of how my relationship with Westone and St. Louis Music (SLM) came to be.

The beginning of the SLM/Dana relationship.

In 1986 a sales representative of SLM began bringing his string instrument samples into my guitar shop for basic set-ups prior to showing them to his customers. He also would bring in the latest and greatest of his Crate amplifier samples. My staff and I would demo the products and show the rep. some sample settings that he could use when presenting the product to his customers. He would often comment on how the tone of the Crate amplifiers had “sparkle” when they were demoed in my shop. That sparkle was not audible from those amplifiers when demoed with the same model instruments in other stores. I explained that the instruments in my shop had Detonator pickups and an active mid range control installed in them for sales demonstration purposes. All designed by myself and sold exclusively at my shop. Expressing curious interest in the product he asked if I ever thought of producing the product nationally. Now I was curious….(let’s see…hmmm…thousand’s instead of tens….my name perhaps in a nationally distributed catalog….) OK! Eventually, I was put in contact with the Westone product manager at SLM. The rest is history.