LAVA MUSIC was founded in Musicians Institute, Hollywood by Louis Lu, Kayeung So, and Shin Tang in 2013. Louis described the name LAVA as the sense of continuous passion and love.

In the beginning, LAVA sold instruments from other manufacturers and brands. Later, Louis realized the manufacturers had stopped innovating and their success relied on the models that had been there for the past 50~60 years. Louis believes that music is about creating the future so he wanted to push the innovation forward in the industry.

Since then, LAVA started designing its own products. Simultaneously, Louis posted the mission statement of the company on its blog, which was to inspire the world through music.

In 2015, LAVA released its first product, LAVA GUITAR. Together with the team, Louis started the unibody guitar project, which later became the original LAVA ME. By this time, Louis’s dream was to create an instrument that could be both physically and artistically perfect. He wanted to make something that could be integrated into peoples’ modern lives.

The team first built the unibody guitar from a block of wood composites, and found that they had to change the R&D direction to a different type of material. They began working with one of the largest material manufacturers, KingFa technologies, to develop a new kind of carbon fiber composite material that is lightweight, durable, and has a great acoustic performance. The material was named “AirSonic”.

Louis introduced the original LAVA ME at the International Music Trade Exhibition in Shanghai on October 13th, 2017. It was the world’s first one-piece injection-molded guitar. The intention was to create a guitar that is light, easy, and integrated into peoples’ modern lives. The LAVA ME introduced tons of technologies, from the carbon fiber material, unibody injection-molded processes, unique acoustic and mechanic structures, and much more.

In 2018, The LAVA ME 2 was released, later becoming the best-selling carbon fiber guitar in the world.

In 2018, Louis started a revolutionary project that was founded around the idea of replacing traditional control knobs of acoustic-electric guitars with a multi-touch display and an operating system that could provide features and experiences new to the acoustic guitar.

After 3 years of development, LAVA ME 3 was introduced on August 18th, 2021.

It was the first guitar that featured a multi-touch display and operating system. More importantly, LAVA ME 3 was the first to connect to internet.

In June 2022, more than 20,000 people activated the guitar. People in over 75 countries have spent over 1,000,000 minutes a month on the LAVA ME 3 guitars. There were also more than 10,000 pieces of work being posted on its own social platform LAVA+ within the first 10 months.