Master builder Chad Henrichsen pours his creativity into Falcons, Jets, Penguins, and other axes that soar, including the Tom Petersson 12-string signature bass. His secret: experience and micro-attention to detail.
The art of guitar building lies somewhere between Zen and a lightning strike. The watercourse way of experience dictates some processes, their workflow eased by years or decades of practice. Other turns come in a flash of inspiration and leave an instrument that will give off a distinctive creative charge for decades.
Chad Henrichsen’s inspired builds for the Gretsch Custom Shop are exemplary. Online, you can see his matching Bastogne walnut Duo Jet and Penguin models, as resplendent as Louis XIV furniture, but with a whole lotta music inside. A little searching also reveals a Baritone Jet in an explosive nitro silver sparkle metal flake finish, showing how high a low-tuned instrument can fly. There’s a ’59 Penguin Relic in sonic blue that boasts a vintage voice to match, via TV Jones TV Classic pickups, and a paisley-and-goldburst ’55 Relic Duo Jet with a hiply retro cat’s-eye f-hole, Seymour Duncan DynaSonic pickups, and a Bigsby B3C tailpiece. The guitar looks as if plucked from George Harrison’s dreams.
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That’s just a handful of the multitude of guitars Henrichsen’s made with equal measures of precision, inspiration, and love since 2008, when he joined the Corona, California-based Custom Shop, where he and Gonzalo Madrigal are the master builders. “My mind is constantly running at about a million miles an hour,” he says. “I am always thinking of a different way to do things, like how can I change the internal body chambering structure to maybe make a guitar sound a little bit different? Sometimes those thoughts are fleeting, but when I get one that really sticks I might write out a spec sheet just to have it saved, and go back to it later and build off of that original idea and play with it.”
Those ideas sometimes become the spark for the instruments that Henrichsen makes for the Custom Shop’s annual online dealer events, which he describes as “sort of a mini NAMM show for us. We come up with our own builds and really play around with our ideas.” Some of the results get ordered for top dollar; others are not so lucky. But either way, Henrichsen feels he walks away a winner. “What sticks and what doesn’t gives me a chance to see if I’m in line with the customer base. Some get great reviews; some kind of fall flat, and so you go, ‘well, let me focus on something else.’”
“There were so many little things I had to take in bite-sized chunks as I went along. When I was faced with something I hadn’t seen before, I had to figure it out.”
Henrichsen describes his ascent to master builder as “kind of a weird journey. I actually went to school to be an audio engineer. I wanted to work in a studio and play with faders and all that stuff, but the timing was less than desirable, meaning I got into it at the time DAWs started coming out, and recording technology became widely available to home consumers. That shift happened as I got out of school, so I took a detour. My bandmate at the time got a job here at Fender [which owns Gretsch] and helped me get hired as a setup tech, and then I quickly progressed into doing repairs.”
He’d already been rehearsing for that gig. “I was really interested in guitars and I’d been tinkering around with them,” he says, “swapping pickups—real simple things—and then started working here and really dove headfirst into it. I talked to a lot of the builders that had been here a long time. I got a lot of good pointers, and luckily I had a little place at home where I could go and make some sawdust. I was no stranger to saws. Maybe not so much routers, but I knew how to handle them, and I looked at it from a thousand-foot view and realized, ‘this is just geometry.’ You can make things very complicated if you like, and especially in the Gretsch world, where our designs often dabble in the complicated side of things. But if you want to build a Strat or a Tele, it’s not that much work. So, I started building my own guitars at night and on weekends, and it just snowballed from there. I kept upping my game and kept trying different things, like ‘Now I want to do a carve top,’ and ’Now I want to do a set neck’—and just kept developing my skills.”
Although Henrichsen can build any Gretsch guitar from scratch, his specialty is necks—the most important aspect of an instrument’s playability. “As far as making necks and bodies, we keep it very old school,“ he says.
Henrichsen’s first home-builds were “really models that I wanted for myself and just didn’t have the money to buy. My very first was like a SoCal-style Strat, with a humbucker. The second was basically a copy of a ’54 Les Paul with P-90s and a wraparound tailpiece. That’s where I dove into carve tops. I made a carve-top Telecaster with some Filter’Trons in it. In building my own instruments, I could make them to an exact thickness, make the neck shape exactly how I wanted it. It’s fun to watch it take shape throughout the process, and it gives you a sense of accomplishment after a few months of toiling at home after work when you see it come together and finally get to plug it in and make some noise. It’s the greatest feeling ever, really.”
“We take a problem and we find a solution with what we have to work with: chisels, drill presses, handheld routers.”
After about 18 months at Fender’s Corona factory, Henrichsen transferred to the distribution center. “I worked in the inspection and repair department that deals with all the import models that come in,” he recounts. “We do checks on all that stuff, and if things need to be fixed, we do that. I ended up supervising that line for a couple years, and I applied for the Gretsch position a year before I got it.”
Asked if he hit any serious roadblocks while developing his building technique, Henrichsen replies, “There were so many little things I had to take in bite-sized chunks as I went along. When I was faced with something I hadn't seen before, I had to figure it out—whether sketching it out on paper or making real rudimentary drawings in CAD, like ‘Okay, here’s my bridge height, here’s the thickness of my body, the rise of the top.’ A lot of people do this very differently. Some do actual full-size, one-to-one-scale sketches. It was a lot of little things and I slowly chipped away at them.
This gorgeous walnut G6134 Penguin is one of Henrichsen’s recent creations. It has a natural stain finish, tortoiseshell/cream binding, chrome hardware, a mahogany neck, an ebony fretboard, and a mother of pearl inlay at the 12th fret. The TV Jones TV Classic pickups enjoy a treble-bleed circuit and a no-load tone control.
“In the Gretsch shop, we hardly use any CNC. We do use CNC for the logos and the inlays, just for speed and consistency, but as far as making necks and bodies, we keep it very old school. We actually have an old copy carver, a purely analog machine, and if we want to do a solid top, we actually use that old copy carver. We actually take a lot of pride in not having fancy new machinery. We don’t have engineers that need to program things to make something happen. With Gonzalo and myself, we take a problem and we find a solution with what we have to work with: chisels, drill presses, handheld routers. We obviously have a pin router for things, but other than that, it’s a lot of hands-on work, and I love that.”
So do customers who order a guitar from the Gretsch Custom Shop, which has eight staffers in total. “We have a very small shop and it’s just filled with woodworking tools: joiners, planers, pin routers, edge sanders. It is not fancy by any means,” Henrichsen says. “It’s like a very small cabinet shop. Gonzalo and I have help with finishing and binding, but we basically oversee the whole process. Gonzalo focuses mainly on bodies. I focus mainly on necks, but if either of us has a build that we want to do…. I’ll dive in and make bodies and he’ll make the necks, so our jobs are very intertwined. But just for the sake of efficiency, we tend to stick to those two areas so we can move as fast as we can yet still retain that handmade vibe the Gretsch Custom Shop is known for.”
“Gretsch is kind of known for gadgetry throughout the years, and so to have all those switches.… To me, it’s kind of like piloting the space shuttle, but we’ll happily build whatever they want. I like the surprise orders. And tone is very subjective.”
Exactly how long it takes to deliver a guitar once an order comes from a dealer or player depends on the complexity of the build, as well as how many orders are in line before it. “Something like a standard ’57, ’59 Duo Jet—we can get those out pretty quickly. But a custom Falcon with three pickups and custom inlays and things like that—that all adds to the time,” the luthier says.
One of Henrichsen’s favorite instruments to build is the Tom Petersson Signature 12-String Falcon Bass, which is tagged at $12,999. “It is such a monster, and the reason I like it is because I have to do things very differently from all of our standard necks. For a Jet or a Penguin or Falcon, I have jigs that I use on a shaper table, a pin router.... That speeds things up a little bit for me. But that 12-string bass neck? I literally have to do most of that on a standard router table by hand. That makes you think a little bit differently, keeps you on your toes, and there’s really no room for error. It’s a measure twice, cut once sort of situation.”
Here’s a close-up of the Tom Petersson Signature 12-String Falcon bass, focused on its pair of Custom Seymour Duncan Super’Tron pickups. But for Henrichson, the 3-way switch electronics are a snap. His favorite challenge is hand-shaping, without templates, the 12"-radius neck, which has a 30.5" scale length.
Electronics are another matter. “I love playing with different types of pickups,” he says. “If somebody wants that classic Gretsch twang, then I would go with a TV Classic or maybe a Ray Butts Ful-Fidelity, or if somebody wants a little bit more output, then maybe a Power’Tron. We do a lot of 3-pickup guitars, where you might have a Super’Tron in the bridge, and maybe a DynaSonic or a TV Jones T90 in the middle position. I love mixing pickups because it expands your tonal palette. We could get into the arguments about tone pots or tone switches. I’m not a big fan of the tone switch, but there is a place for them, and some people love ’em, and it doesn’t matter to me when a customer order comes down. You get what you want. But most of the guitars that I come up with are going to have a tone pot. I do enjoy the no-load tone pots, so most of the time that tone’s running wide open. I’m a big believer in trying to keep that signal path as short and as clean as possible. I had a Falcon order a few months ago where the customer wanted a blower switch for the bridge pickup. He also wanted a phase switch for the pickups, and coil taps for each pickup. It took me a couple days to map that out, but it was great fun! And Gretsch is kind of known for gadgetry throughout the years, and so to have all those switches.… To me, it’s kind of like piloting the space shuttle, but we’ll happily build whatever they want. I like the surprise orders. And tone is very subjective.”
“You don’t want to think about your instrument at all. You just want to be that instrument.”
Given that, what does Henrichsen do when a buyer asks for a “crunchy” sound, or something bright and biting? “I reach out to the customer and have a conversation, to say, ‘Okay, what is your idea of brightness or grittiness,’ or whatever adjective they’re using, and try to narrow down as much as I can, so then I can offer suggestions about pickups. But that’s a tough one, so I try to talk it out and offer different options. We explain that, in our experience, if you use this pickup with this body style, this is the kind of sound that you’re going to get. Obviously if you want a really tight focused sound, a full-size hollowbody may not be your thing. All those little things factor in.
Henrichsen sands a neck in the Custom Shop, which he says looks very much like a small woodshop from decades past.
“If I want that really open, big-sky sound, I’m going to go with a Falcon. But if I want something a little tighter, I’m probably going to go with a Jet and maybe even a center-block jet, to tighten it up even more. I’ve done some builds in the past where our Jets and Penguins, even though we call them solidbodies, have not been very solid. They’re highly chambered inside, and I’ve played with the floor of that chamber—lessening the depth—to see how that changes the sound. That’s part of the fun I have as a builder—playing with those dimensions and seeing the results.”
The endgame of all this, of course, is to create a great-playing and -sounding guitar. The key, says Henrichsen, is “attention to detail. That is one of the things I’m most proud of about the shop. All of us really are paying attention 100 percent of the time. Of course, we make mistakes; we’re human. When you are doing some of the run-of-the-mill operations, it’s easy to let your mind wander and you think about, ‘Oh, I’ve got to feed the dogs when I get home,’ or whatever. But we really try to be cognizant of that and get that tunnel vision, in a good way. With woodworking, if you’re not paying attention for half a second, things can go sideways, or you may miss a little hairline crack in that wood and it may rear its ugly head later on when you’re trying to put a finish on it. If every little piece that makes a final product is the best it can be, then that final product is going to be even greater.
“The player can immediately recognize when the proper attention has been paid to details,” he continues. “We do a lot of binding over frets, for example, and when you have those fret ends nice and smooth, it feels comfortable. Things are balanced. The last thing you want as a player is distractions. You don’t want to think about your instrument at all. You just want to be that instrument. It needs to be a part of you, not something that you’re fighting. When the customer picks it up, and it just works and it feels great, and they have no complaints whatsoever…. That’s our end goal every time.”
Ilja Krumins’ metamorphosis from psychobilly raver to being one of the gear industry’s most ambitious visionaries.
It’s Summer NAMM 2017, and Gamechanger Audio’s booth—hardly more than a card table—is shoved against the back wall amongst the sorts of wares that make you quicken your pace and avoid eye contact. You hazard a glance at the lone product on display, a skinny black box with a brass piano-style sustain pedal, and can’t help thinking it seems as much a solution in search of a problem as the head-scratchers at adjacent booths.
And yet the earnestness/nervousness of the twentysomethings behind the table makes you wonder. Do they know how brash their company name strikes everyone? Do they realize how many people passing by are smirking inwardly and writing them off, stomp unheard, for their sheer audacity?
Intrigued, you stop and strike up a conversation. The Slavic accent is immediately apparent. The leader introduces himself as Ilja, plugs in a guitar, and begins explaining the strange-looking device. Your eyes wander back to the piano-style activator, and you feel a surge of the previous pessimism mingled with budding pity and horror: Did these guys blow a wad of cash on a transatlantic trip just to exhibit a quirky-looking sample-and-hold stompbox?
But the more you listen—both to the words coming out of Ilja’s mouth, and to the haunting layers of textured sounds coming from the Plus—the more you realize perhaps you are the fool.
* * *
Six months later, the Latvian crew is once again at NAMM, only this time it’s the huge Winter show in Anaheim. What’s more, they’re on the main show floor—up where the big cats play. Their booth is four times its previous size and crawling with guitarists itching for a go at Gamechanger’s latest: a deliciously violent-sounding fuzz box called the Plasma Pedal that appears to be more conventional than the Plus … that is until you see that the input signal is passing through a xenon-gas-filled tube as literal lightning.
* * *
Fast forward another year. Gamechanger (gamechangeraudio.com) is back on the main floor at Winter NAMM, and the crew, dapper in skinny ties, white shirts, and black slacks, is even bigger. The company’s newest devices—Motor Pedal and Motor Piano prototypes that pair musical-note information with mechanical sounds emanating from a series of miniature spinning motors—don’t just prove Gamechanger Audio is aptly named. They make it clear it’s high time PG take a closer look at this cadre of truly different-thinking designers.
* * *
“I fucking hate pedals … I think the whole boutique pedal world is a little bit boring … a little bit silly.”
It’s not quite the sentiment we’re expecting from the head of an outfit whose sole products at the moment are pedals. It’s more like what we’d expect from, say, a hardcore rockabilly player. Interestingly, Ilja Krumins is both.
“We don’t see this as a pedal company, and we don’t see ourselves as pedal nerds,” he says matter-of-factly via video-call from the company’s sparkling-clean two-level loft office in Riga, Latvia. “We are trying to find interesting ways to mangle sound … to extract sound out of interesting items.”
The more we talk—about Krumins’ background, about the contextual genesis of Gamechanger’s fascinating designs—the more the genius of this up-and-coming outfit comes into focus.
* * *
Let’s start off talking about your journey as a musician. Who were your favorite guitarists and bands?
At first, Jimi Hendrix. Deep Purple, the obvious bands that you gravitate towards when you’re starting. The stuff that made guitar cool. Pretty soon it was Stevie Ray Vaughan, then Brian Setzer. Then probably John Scofield. These days my favorite guitarist is J.J. Cale.
I started playing when I was 16. My first guitar was a ’78 American Strat, which was super rare in these parts. It was $500, so it was a no-brainer. That was a big motivation to play. In a year’s time, me and Matiss [Tazans, drummer and Gamechanger’s marketing and public relations manager] met and formed a standard, pentatonic-scale-based rock ’n’ roll band.
Gamechanger’s first product, the Plus Pedal, records all incoming audio and uses a pressure-sensitive, multi-function piano-style pedal to engage a “smart looper” at varying levels of attack and decay as the unit captures the last half of the latest note or chord and creates a seamless loop out of it.
How long ago was this?
Well, me and Matiss were 17 and 18. Now we’re 27 and 28—oh fuck, that’s 10 years ago. Shit! Okay, so yeah, then we started, like, ripping off all the classic rock stuff, writing our own songs. The band was called Acid Rain. We had the basic mix of dad rock, played with a lot of enthusiasm and energy.
What sorts of gear did you use early on?
I fucking hate pedals. I only had a Tube Screamer and a Danelectro Dan-Echo. I loved that echo, because it’s one of the few that does a good slapback—and it has a tone control. I don’t understand why delay pedals rarely offer a tone control. When I want a rockabilly slapback, I want it to be really crispy and trebly, because I want it to be tight. But if I’m doing a slower delay, I want to roll off the treble so it’s wishy-washy. I also had a Fulltone Supa-Trem. So yeah, Gretsch guitar, Tube Screamer, delay pedal, tremolo, and a Fender-style amp.
We spent about a year in rehearsals, and for two years we were actively playing clubs. We were really loud and just having fun, compensating for our lack of skill with energy. It was a very nice, innocent time. Then me and Matiss realized we wanted to play more and try to make it a job. At some point, we grew out of dad rock and became fascinated with Americana genres. We made a band called the Big Bluff, which was a rockabilly/country/rock ’n’ roll cover band. We spent a lot of years gigging, trying to learn all these songs properly, but playing them super loud and with a young, rock ’n’ roll attitude. We were super influenced by psychobilly.
Then what?
In 2012 or 2013, me and Matiss, and our bass player, a double-bass guy, moved to London and started writing our own songs. We thought, Okay, Stray Cats became really popular and got their break in London…. We were following that vibe, but mixing really heavy riffs with slap bass through Boss pedals. We all loved the Stray Cats drummer [Slim Jim Phantom], who plays a stand-up kit, so we rebuilt Matiss’s kit. He has this gigantic ’70s, Bonham-style Ludwig drum kit, and we made it so that it could be played standing up. This massive, freakazoid Ludwig kick drum was on a stand, facing upward. It was me on a Gretsch guitar, Matiss on this big Ludwig monstrosity, and this crazy dude on double bass playing through fuzz pedals. We thought we were going to take the world by storm with this strange mix.
Marketing and public relations manager/former Acid Rain and Big Bluff drummer Matiss Tazans (foreground) and other Gamechanger employees hard at work in the loft at company headquarters.
How long did you stay in London?
For three years. I even went to this music school. Matiss and the double-bass guy didn’t last as long. The bass guy left after a year. Matiss stuck around for a while, but we couldn’t find a replacement who was good with the double bass. I stayed to finish school.
Which school was it?
It used to be called Guitar Institute, but now it’s called ICMP—Institute of Contemporary Music Performance. It’s basically a London version of Berklee or Musician’s Institute.
Which program were you enrolled in?
It was called Creative Music or something like that. It had a bit of recording, a bit of technology, a bit of composition, and a bit of guitar. I had this really cool guitar teacher from Italy teaching me sweep-pick shredding on a 7-string prog-metal guitar.
That totally seems like your kind of thing.
[Laughs.] Trying to learn sweep picking on a Gretsch with .012-gauge strings! I was also working a day job, trying to get gigs, and going to concerts. I was not very focused on school. In my third year I had a cool day job, though: I was the night guy in a youth hostel. You’d sit there from 11 at night till 8 in the morning, so you’d get at least five hours of free time where you could just play guitar.
So you were in school for three years. Did you graduate?
Yeah. In the third year I started getting interested. We had this assignment where we had to present a technology-based business plan, and I somehow got obsessed with this theoretical music-software idea.
What was the concept?
I really hope we’ll build it at some point, so I don’t want to give it away! I got a pretty decent grade, though. I had a lot of compliments from teachers.
It sounds like that last year in school turned your mind from being a musician toward getting into the gear business.
Yeah, exactly. The band broke up and both of the guys moved away, so I was there on my own. Also, I broke my wrist and couldn’t play guitar during that third year. But I had the job where I was sitting there all night thinking about stuff. I had to find a new thing to get obsessed about. You know how, if you open this Pandora’s Box, newer and newer ideas start coming in before you’re even finished with the old one? I realized I had a new idea! The idea was … do you still see me—is my video on?
Yeah, I can see you.
This is the Gretsch I got when me and Matiss were 18 and busking in Helsinki, Finland. The idea was, what if I had some kind of thing that emits a magnetic force here [points to Bigsby B6 tailpiece]? When I flip the handle like this [positions vibrato bar over tailpiece], it enters the magnetic field and starts going up and down—and there are controls for depth and speed, too. I knew absolutely nothing about physics and exponential forces, so I spent a lot of time building this stupid idea.
It’s a cool idea!
I spent a year building it, so obviously I loved it. I had the energy and enthusiasm to attach a battery pack and a motor with a belt. But if you stepped back and took a good look, it was stupid. It was this massive contraption—it made no sense as a commercial product. But I had a lot of fun with it, and it was a practical lesson in making something from scratch.
When I finished the tremolo, I already had the idea for the Plus Pedal, but I didn’t have a team. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to build it on my own, so I started talking to some guys I knew from the rockabilly scene here, and it turned out they are electronics engineers. They are the co-founders of Gamechanger Audio.
The Motor Pedal prototype displayed at Winter NAMM 2019 is currently taking a backseat to development of Gamechanger’s ambitious Motor Synth, but based on how cool even the early version sounded, we’re hoping it’s not too much longer till it enters production. Photo by Shawn Hammond
There are four co-founders, right?
Right. Mārtiņš Meļķis and Kristaps Kalva—apart from being cool rockabilly musicians—are extremely talented and skilled engineers. Both were star students at Riga Technical University and got snatched up by the biggest electronics companies here right away. They aren’t the typical guitarist-gets-a-soldering-iron-and-learns-through-Google type of builders—they were both well-educated engineers with prestigious jobs working on very advanced technology-development and manufacturing assignments. I assumed they were full-time musicians, but as soon as I found out they were engineers I approached Kristaps and told him about the Plus Pedal idea. We talked for about an hour, shook hands, and made a deal to start a company and build this thing. Two days later, Mārtiņš came aboard, and about a week after that we converted my flat into a workshop.
Didzis Dubovskis came onboard three, four months later. At first only as a consultant, later—around our first Winter NAMM—as a full-timer. He spent six years at a charter airline called SmartLynx, where he worked as second-in-command sales manager. We were friends in high school, then he went off to study economics. Played bass for a while but then switched to suit and tie. He has always been the most advanced dude in my circle of friends. He was, and still is, a total Metallica, Rammstein, and Black Sabbath freak.
What happened after you assembled the founding team?
We started working on the Plus in October of 2015 and spent a year and a half developing it. Everybody finished their day job at about 6 o’clock, from 6 to 7 everybody got dinner, and at 7 everybody met at my apartment to work till 1 in the morning. Saturdays and Sundays, we worked all day. We naively thought it would take two or three months and that we’d have it ready by Christmas. We ended up having it ready for the next Christmas.
What inspired the idea for the Plus?
When we couldn’t find a bass player in London. I had some shows booked and we decided to do them White Stripes-style—drums and guitar. I tried to find delay pedals and shimmer reverbs to provide some kind of backdrop, but it didn’t sound great. We ended up rearranging all the songs, and I was playing riffs instead of solos. So the idea was living in me for a long time, but in some different part of the brain.
So it was inspired by wanting to fill out the sonic spectrum as a duo. Did you have exact ideas about how it would do that?
I had a full idea, but a very basic one: It’s going to select a loop, it’s going to be black, it’s going to be called Plus Pedal, and it’s going to have a brass piano thing on it. Then we started reading books and it was, like, Okay, we’re going to have to program this. Who knows programming? Nobody. Let’s start reading about that shit. We assessed what skills we were going to need, and then we learned a little bit and launched it.
The improbable journey from passionate woodworker to jazz bassist, navy SEAL, touring road tech for metal giants, and, finally, to luthier of exquisite handmade instruments.
When you sit down to talk with many guitar luthiers, the story of how they got into building is often uncannily similar: They fell in love with the sounds of some famous guitar god during their teen years and started playing not too long after that. Eventually they took their first foray into DIY by modding their own instrument, followed by a stab at replicating, say, a Tele, a Les Paul, or maybe some sort of “super strat.” The more they played and tweaked, the more they loved it all, but at some point it hit them that they were better at (or more likely to make a living via) the wood-and-wires side of things than the playing side.
Of course, there’s nothing weird or wrong with any of that. How else would you expect someone to get into it? But when Premier Guitar met Adriano Sergio at the Holy Grail Guitar Show in Berlin last spring, we were immediately struck not just by the uniqueness of his guitars and his approach to lutherie, but also by the adventurous life he led prior to devoting himself to the craft full-time in 2016.
As anyone can readily see, Sergio’s instruments are notable strictly on their own merits: They look like magnificent specimens of living timber summoned from the forests of Tolkien’s Rivendell. That’s probably because he began carving up the family furniture when he was just 4 years old, the ever-curious son of a Portuguese immigrant couple struggling to make ends meet in Paris. Within two years, Sergio’s parents had detected enough passion in their young son to buy him his first real tool set—parts of which he still uses today.
There are solutions.
Fast-forward 46 years, and the proprietor of Ergon Guitars (ergonguitars.com) is back in his native Lisbon, still making his mark on the world with a knife as his main tool. Each of Sergio’s sumptuous instruments is carved by hand, the exact form coming to him spontaneously as he peels back ribbon after ribbon of mahogany, cedar, or swamp ash. As with the alluded-to magical Elven artifacts, there’s also a lot more to Sergio’s guitars than is immediately apparent. Nearly every Ergon model features an intricate hollow interior whose carefully tuned ports are so lovely as to seem merely cosmetic. But the flowing lines aren’t just an artful rendering of form and function with allusions to abstract nudes—though they are indeed that. Although Sergio takes inspiration from the visual arts, film, architecture, and even literature, his meticulous attention to detail serves both structural and tonal ends. Yes, the elegant joining of woods is so cohesive and expertly rendered that it’s difficult to determine where, for example, one dovetailed neck piece ends and the other begins. But Sergio’s neck joints are also so tight and stable that he can string each guitar to pitch—sans glue—in order to fine-tune the instrument’s resonance.
In our estimation, all this seemed like enough to warrant a lovely little film documentary, and yet there’s much more to Sergio’s captivating story. The more we spoke with Sergio, the more we were intrigued. In fact, it was his life that inspired PG to begin profiling builders again after scaling back for a few years. For starters, who would’ve pegged the builder of such head-turning instruments as a former guitar tech for heavy acts like Ozzy Osborne, Anthrax, and Napalm Death? Especially considering he’s actually a conservatory-trained jazz bassist who walked away from a prolific touring and studio career. Oh, and did we mention that he was also the Portuguese equivalent of a U.S. Navy SEAL?
“With every guitar I do,” says Ergon Guitars’ Adriano Sergio, “I get closer and closer to where I want to go. The last one”—the Porto MS shown here—“is really, really close. It has an almost piano-like sound.”
We recently had a lovely Skype video call with Sergio from his shop in Lisbon, where he happily showed off his nearly half-century-old mallet, his first-ever solidbody, and the philosophy driving a budding career in which the affable builder is taking part in projects with esteemed European luthiers such as Ulrich Teuffel, Claudio Pagelli, Michael Spalt, and Nik Huber, as well as displaying his instruments at prestigious gatherings such as Art Fair Tokyo 2019—the latter of which has reportedly never before included guitars.
What got you into building guitars?
Everything started because I wanted to play guitar when I was a kid. Actually, I wanted to play bass, because I have really fat fingers and everybody told me, “You cannot play guitar—you have fat fingers!” I was studying classical guitar, which was a problem having fat fingers [laughs]. When I was 17, somebody gave me a [Fender] Jazz bass neck from ’74. So I decided to make the body. I didn’t know anything about it, but I started to make the body with the help of an old man. I’d been playing with wood since I was a kid. When I say “a kid,” I’m talking about 6 years old. My parents gave me a toolbox with small but quite good tools. I’m actually still using this mallet. I stopped using one of the pliers, like, two years ago. I remember, before that, my parents left home one day, and I started to cut the edges of a table with a knife. I just found it fascinating, the curling wood when you cut it. So I did all around the kitchen table, and I wasn’t happy with that, so I did any corner of wood furniture in the house.
Watch our video interview and demo with Ergon's Adrian Sergio:
I bet they were happy!
They weren’t happy, and I wasn’t happy when they found out. When they came home I was in a panic, “They’re going to find out!” My father was like, “What the fuck is that?” It was a hard time. I come from a really working class family. My father was always doing everything at home—metalwork, woodwork, everything—and I was always watching him.
Let’s get back to that first bass. Did you try to make the body just like a Fender J?
Yes. It looked like Jaco Pastorius’ bass, actually—the same sunburst and everything.Later on, I turned it into a fretless—well, half the neck was fretless, and half had frets. I started to play in bands with that bass. Of course, to play the bass I needed an amplifier. But I had no money, so I made my first amp also. I didn’t know anything about electronics, so I bought a book and put everything together. The funny thing is, I paid somebody to build me the cabinet, because someone told me, “Oh, the cabinet is acoustic. Everything has to be …” whatever. It was a stereo amp. I remember I had problems with distortion a lot of times. I learned so much with that. After that my father bought me a bass, an Ibanez Blazer—which was worse than the bass I made!
Adriano Sergio’s parents gave him this tool set when he was just 6 years old, not long after he’d taken to carving up all the household furniture. He retired the pliers two years ago, but still uses the mallet today.
What happened next in your musical career?
Then it came time for me to go to military service. In Portugal [at the time], everybody had to [serve]. So in 1987 I was selected to go to the navy for two years, and I spent 26 months as a scuba diver and navy SEAL. I started studying jazz when I was still in the navy, at the end of it. After the navy, I worked as a scuba diver for two years and went to a jazz school—the best jazz school we have here in Lisbon. It’s one of the oldest ones in Europe, actually. It’s called Hot Club [Hot Clube de Portugal].
That’s quite a combination of pursuits. Were you a scuba tour guide or…?
I was doing everything you can imagine: cleaning the hulls of oil ships, underwater welding and repair, rescuing bodies, [helping with] movies, teaching people—I even handled explosives. I was earning a lot of money, so I bought instruments and gear, but I wasn’t happy. [Scuba work] was affecting my ears—it was affecting everything.
You mean the water pressure was affecting your hearing?
Yeah. Also, the working environment was not the most healthy for me—the people were rude. I liked to scuba dive, but I was starting to hate it. So I just quit that and took myself 100 percent to music. After that I was really successful as a session player in Portugal. I started gigging professionally, full-time, when I was 23. But after a while I wasn’t happy with the music. I was playing with the biggest upward artists—like, really chic pop—but I hated it.So what I decided was to be a tech. I was really comfortable with guitars, basses, amplifiers—everything—because I never stopped getting into gear. Just like music, I like gear.
What year did you start doing tech work?
My first tour was ’98 or ’99, but I was also playing—just music I liked, though. I started to tour full-time in 2000. That was when I did my first world tour. My first tour was with Moonspell, a Portuguese band, and Kreator, a German band.
Those are metal bands, right?
Yeah. I mainly toured with metal bands. It was 46 days and 46 gigs. No days off.
Wow!
I was in heaven. I was really proud—I was the first Portuguese guy to [do tech] work outside Portugal.
How did you prepare for those tours—did you have to learn a bunch of stuff about amps and effects really quickly?
When I teach people and do workshops and things like that, I always tell people, if you want to learn something and you don’t know it, tell people you know it, and just make sure they will not be able to call you a liar. Just go home and make sure you learn it. That was always my way of life.
Take every opportunity you can, and if you don’t know it, learn it?
Oh yeah. Say yes all the time. Be humble—you have to be humble—but [remember that] everything is possible. I’m not afraid. What I learned as a scuba diver and navy SEAL is that there are no problems. There are solutions.
Compared to the situations you faced in the navy and as a scuba diver, other situations must not have seemed very scary in comparison.
No, but there’s a big similarity—you have to work as a team. A lot of people are afraid to work on teams, because they’re afraid to lose a job. I like to be a team worker. I like to help. Not because I want to take something out of it, but because it’s the only way.
What would you say was one of your biggest lessons from your navy and scuba work?
The moments that had the most impact on my life as both a guitar tech and a luthier happened during the SEAL training course in January 1988. It started with 182 people applying, but only about eight of us got to the end. Every other Friday, before going on leave for the weekend—when there was leave for the weekend—we had to go take a swim. And when I say “swim,” I mean swimming for five or six hours in the Tagus River—from the pillars of the 25 de Abril Bridge back to Alfeite Naval Base. In the cold winter water. After a 42-meter dive. About halfway through, you’ve got tears in your eyes and all you want to do is stop. But the guy next to you would tell you to not give up, to keep going. The same guy, minutes later, would be the one saying he was giving up, and it was your turn to pull him through. We would all struggle through together until we got back to base. The lesson from that that stays with me to this day is the importance of determination, of carrying things through to the end. Also, the importance of shared effort: It didn’t matter if one of us got back alone, but that we all got there together—that we could count on each other, and that we shared the bond of camaraderie. My time in the navy also taught me the importance of being prepared—doing your homework really well—so that when you come across problems you can solve them readily and easily. Basically, the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk. This period of my life also taught me to not be afraid of failure, to not avoid trying something out of fear of making a mistake.
Above left: When he was 17, Sergio received a 1974 Fender Jazz-bass neck as a gift. He soon began work on a matching body modeled after the one played by fusion hero Jaco Pastorius. Above right: Sergio after a scuba excursion circa 1988, when he was a member of the Portuguese navy’s equivalent of the U.S. Navy SEAL team. Lower left: Sergio working on legendary Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris’ Fender Precision circa 2016.
So being cocky and acting like you’re a badass isn’t the way to success.
You can be cocky if you deserve to be cocky—cocky, but not arrogant—if you’ve proven you’re really good. But you have to be a team worker, too. Being cocky can be because you’re proud about yourself. But a lot of people are cocky because they want to hide who they actually are.
It's interesting you started out as a jazz aficionado, but ended up tech-ing for metal bands.
Metal players really respect the fans, and the fans really respect the bands. It’s why metal is still alive and is growing again. A lot of the bands have a social message behind the songs or the attitude, and I think a lot of the fans see themselves behind that message. If the message changes, they will be disappointed, and they will react.
Did you listen to metal as a teenager?
No, no! Not at all. I started to listen to and respect metal when I started to work in metal.When I got a call to work for Ronnie James Dio, I called my wife and asked her, “Do you know Ronnie James Dio?” She was like, “You don’t know who Ronnie James Dio is?” Of course, after I heard the songs [again], it was like, “Okay, I’ve heard these songs before.” But I didn’t know anything about him. The closest thing I’d heard was Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple. I knew and liked Led Zeppelin, but that’s probably the closest [thing to metal I liked]. I liked a lot of funk and things like that. Do I listen to metal now? Yes. I do with a lot of pleasure—not all of it—but I do.
What was it like working with Ronnie?
I did the last European tour with Dio, which was really good for me. That was eight or nine years ago. Ronnie was a really, really special guy. One day he came over while I was carrying the gear, and he got the snare drum and started to help us. I was like, “Don’t do that!” And he was like, “Don’t tell me what to do, man—that’s my gear! [Besides] the sooner you are done, the more time we have to find out if we like each other.” [Laughs.] That was a great tour.
You also worked with Ozzy and Anthrax, right?
Ozzy, Anthrax, Strapping Young Lads, [Swedish death metal act] Dark Tranquility. My first U.S. tour was Strapping Young Lads, Napalm Death, and Nile. I spent the last two [tech-ing] years with Anthrax and Iron Maiden. I was not [officially] tech-ing for Iron Maiden, but I was doing the setups on Steve Harris’ bass.