A little more about my biography…
My name is Juan Carlos Balado and my passion for music goes back to the 80’s, in which I spent part of my childhood. At that time, my brother was living in Zürich but he usually came back home at Christmas with an enormous luggage full of chocolate and cassette tapes.
This way I discovered international bands such us The Police, AC/DC, The Scorpions, Ozzy Osborne or The Beatles between others. This fact allowed me to listen to a new kind of music with psychedelic sounds to which my ears were not used to, those fast and impossible guitar solos or those catchy chorus, that instead of I didn’t understand a word, loved humming all the day at the same time I played the guitar with the broom handle.
Woodworking was my other great passion and I liked engraving wood with a knife listening to the radio sat next to a coal-burning stove at those cold winter evenings. I used to spend my time inventing and creating things and at this point and tired of using the broom handle as a guitar, at the age of 14, I designed and built my first electric guitar inspired in the Larrivee S4 used by Kee Marcello of Europe, yes, you have heard right, those hairy Sweden top 40 with The final countdown. As you can imagine, it didn’t work but it was pretty beautiful.
The years were passing by and I worked as quality control technician for a long period of time. I combined my job with the university classes. It was then and due to the economic recession we suffered here in Spain on one hand, and the fact that I felt unsatisfied with my job, on the other hand, that I decided to undertake the project that had left me a mark since I was a child, the guitar building.
This way Balado Custom guitars was born in 2012. We are a little company where we build electric custom guitars and basses totally by hand from Spain, following the traditional method and according to the design and technical specifications of your necessities and tastes using always finest materials and an excellent construction in order to ensure that each instrument is unique not only for its beauty but for its sound, although our main ingredients are the love and passion we put in our work.
This is my biography, if you liked, I invite you to continue surfing the site and specially our blog where I’ll show the process of some of the most remarkable buildings. Thanks for your time.
Juan Carlos Balado
