3 Comments

Alexander Oest May 14, 2010

Congratulations. Those are four beautiful and unique guitars. It just occurred to me that they might some day be sought-after collectors guitars if the design catches on and you start making more of them (series or mass production). They’d be known as The Early Four.

But talking about how things might go; would you care to share your thoughts of the future, now that the guitar show is well over and you’ve gotten some feedback? Do you have plans for making more guitars, and in what scale?

I remember when you first mentioned the EGS tuner system in the BTEG forum. Back then, you seemed like a very qualified hobbyist with a good idea for a headless tuner system, but I guess nobody expected it to come this far. So, sorry for asking, but I’m curious: Do you plan to just go with the flow and follow your impulses or are you considering something more full time or large scale?
Ola Strandberg May 15, 2010

Hi Alex, thanks for your comments. These are great questions; questions that I didn’t really ask myself to begin with – I just went with the flow and it started snowballing – but that I have certainly been thinking about a lot lately.

The show was a huge success as far as I am concerned. But going from the positive response I received to actually making sales can be a long journey. Guitarists are a very conservative breed and Sweden is a tiny and very remote place to be.

The costs of mechnanical product development are ridiculous, so there is really no way of doing it in a small scale unless it is extremely small, i.e. at a hobby level. I have taken it beyond that – “Alea iacta est” – and am enjoying the personal relationships I have established with luthiers around the world immensely.

I have many more ideas, but need funding to realize them. The path I am on currently is to grow organically by building and selling my EGS guitars. I also have a few side projects brewing with luthiers that want guitars made from all-Swedish materials. Next milestone is going down to part-time on my day job and doing guitar work on week days, which will be a big change for the good! I might sell one or two of the prototypes but generally build to order.

In an ideal world, I would partner up with someone extremely skilled in the crafts and with the patience required to build high quality instruments that could focus on production, and I could focus more on design. In the same ideal world, a distributor would buy a large quantity of hardware, enabling me to lower the cost of manufacturing. I am restrictive in following my impulses at this point to see where things go.

So, no one would want more than I to make “The Early Four” collectibles!
Alexander Oest May 15, 2010

Thanks for explaining. It all makes good sense. I hope you’ll be able to continue development at a pace that suits you.

Building from local wood sounds interesting. I’ve often thought about how fun it could be if you could get someone to scientifically test the acoustic and physical properties Scandinavian wood species… how long does it sustain, which parts of the sound spectrum are dampened the most, etc. At the Technical University of Denmark,there was (and perhaps still is) a “science shop”, where people could present a particular problem or task and have students work on it in a graduate project. Could be interesting to have such people shed some light on the matter. Even though I know it’s often said that storage time, density of growth rings and other properties matter more than the species of the wood.

…but apart from that; do you know of aresguitar.se? He builds a lot from the local species.

And on a quite different note: Do you plan to do further work on the monocoque carbon fibre guitar that you worked on some time ago.

/Alex