First of all let me introduce myself.

I’m Gordon Roberts and I operate Flaxwood North America, the westernmost edge of this amazing guitar company that calls the wooded extremities of eastern Finland it’s home. For many years I worked for Eastman Guitars here in the States where I aided in the rebirth of the affordable jazz archtop guitar and took a crazy idea and turned it into a multi million dollar business (you can see them here). Early summer of last year I was getting ready to launch a new business. My business partner and I had purchased a workshop in Beijing, China where we had begun to manufacture our own line of gypsy jazz archtops (you can check them out here) as well as a line of violins, violas and cellos. The all important summer NAMM Show was looming in Austin Texas so we bit the bullet and decided to get a booth and see what the great unwashed thought about our new products. I flew out to California where our warehouse was located the week before the show and spent a lot of time tweaking the show instruments to the point of perfection and preparing the inevitable pricelists and business cards and calling all my dealers to make sure they came by and checked us out. We had debated about how to get the instruments and the booth to Austin and finally decided that Andy, our trusty employee, and I would just get in the van and drive the 1300 miles across the desert.

I had never driven this route and it has been on my "to do" list for years and Andy is a fine traveling companion. I brought my ipod stocked with Gram Parsons desert tunes, Richard Thompson’s genius and the new Kate Bush cd and Andy supplied all the Bjork you could ever want on his ipod plus the new Thom Yorke cd to boot and we were off. This is one of the great drives in the US and it took us through breathtaking desert scenery passing through Phoenix, Tuscon and El Paso and finally all the way to Austin. The journey alone would have been enough to make this trip one of the more memorable NAMM Show experiences of my career but, there was something else lurking in the shadows that was going to change things for me quite drastically and get me to realign a lot of what I had become to believe was set in stone (or should I say wood) about guitar design and manufacture. That thing lurking in the shadows was a charming gentleman from Finland called Kim Lerche.

On the second day of the show Kim wandered into our booth with a look of severe jet lag on his face and a story about some new material that they had developed in Finland that was going to revolutionize the guitar world. Let’s bear in mind that Kim was probably the twentieth person to walk into the booth that morning with a story about how they were ready to spring the next big thing onto the unsuspecting guitar buying public (bear in mind this is the premier musical instrument event of the summer) so I of course politely listened to him and smiled a lot. I felt that I had heard a lot of what he was saying before and the rest of it seemed completely impractical, some crazy idea involving injection molding and revolutionary materials. My normal reaction would have been to shuffle him out of my booth as quickly as possible and I was about to do this when he made a gesture for which I will forever be grateful to him. He offered to buy me breakfast.

I suppose that he suspected that my British accent might betray a small amount of Scottish ancestry and that my DNA would be incapable of resisting a free meal of any kind and he was right. So it came about that I found myself sitting in a hotel restaurant holding one of the most incredible solid body guitars I had ever played. To say that I was stunned would be an understatement. I’m sure that many of you reading this have already held one of these instruments so you know what I’m talking about but for those of you still to experience one let me give you my first impression. It felt so comfortable, the balance point was perfect, the neck felt like nothing I had ever played before and the styling was simple, elegant, sophisticated and downright beautiful. The whole instrument came alive under my fingers and I could feel the resonance in very much the same way that you feel it in a classic archtop, through your body. The intonation was better than anything I had ever heard before and the whammy bar actually worked. I sat there yanking on it for quite a while trying to get it to go out of tune but it never did. Over the years I have trained myself to find the faults in a guitar very quickly but this one seemed to have none. It was the whole package, complete and fully realized. Kim explained again about this new material called Flaxwood and this time I listened and began to think that for once this gentleman’s claims about the next great breakthrough in Guitar design might actually hold water. Later that evening at one of Austin’s fine watering holes we agreed to keep talking and I booked my flight to Finland as soon as I returned home to Maryland.

By the time I landed in Helsinki I had managed to get the guitars into the hands of some of the best players I knew, a couple of them pretty famous in their own right, and my impression had been borne out by them all. The common reaction was initial skepticism followed by immediate enthusiasm followed by a bad case of gas (guitar acquisition syndrome). Kim met me at my hotel and we began a tradition of great meals accompanied by the ever present bottle of Finnish vodka and some of the best conversation to be had anywhere.

Kim, it seems, speaks just about every European language fluently and like me spent his childhood traveling the world with his diplomatic parents. The next day we hopped on the bullet train to travel to Joensuu in the eastern part of Finland to visit the workshop and factory responsible for the guitars.

Joensuu is a small but vibrant little university town that seems to have a very young population. We arrived late in the day and had just enough time to check in to the hotel and rush off for another great meal and get stoked for the workshop tour in the morning. The facility is tucked into the far end of an extremely modern manufacturing facility and you have to walk past a lot of very expensive looking machinery that appears to be turning out all kinds of interesting and different products. I saw snow shoes and window frames along with other fascinating looking stuff coming off the production line. Finally I was ushered into a room with a bunch of tooling that looked strangely familiar. Fret files, buffing wheels and lined up against the wall a bunch of Flaxwood Guitars just begging to be played.

Kim introduced me to Veijo Rautia who is the luthier that has overseen the whole project and he walked me through as much of the process as he was willing to let me in on. There is a lot of proprietary stuff going on here and Kim tells me that they won’t even tell him how some of the results are achieved. What came across immediately to me was the dedication that these guys have to their product. Years of work went into the instruments before they were unveiled and every little detail of the guitars was engineered from scratch. Veijo is a very thoughtful man and I could see that many long hours had been spent fretting (excuse the pun) over even the smallest details. I was shown the molds and the machines where the extruding takes place and Veijo walked me through the finishing and painting processes. Everything is state of the art and the finished product really reflects the time and effort that Flaxwood has put in. No half measures here.

Back on the train to Helsinki with a backgammon board and a beer or two to pass the time we plotted our assault on the US market between moves. Kim naturally beat me soundly at backgammon, must remember never to play him for money. That would really be a bad move.

Back in Helsinki I got to meet some of the other members of the team. Jussi, who is an incredible musician in his own right and is responsible for this wonderful website along with the graphics team that put together all of the literature that you see at your local Flaxwood dealer. Yet another inevitable dinner ensued followed by a slow crawl around several of the late night drinking facilities of the Finnish capital. My favorite was a transplanted circa 1970’s Russian bar that had been transported lock stock and jukebox from the Russian capital and now played host to a bunch of émigré muscovites. They sat at the bar crying into their vodkas while the jukebox played some dirgelike songs from a different time and place. After that the evening became a blur and I somehow made it back to my hotel for an early morning taxi to the airport and back to the states. A layover of a few hours in London’s Heathrow airport reacquainted me with the amazing power that a good fried English breakfast can have over a powerful hangover. I was left wondering just exactly how much pressure was needed to extrude one of those sausages and how I hoped nobody would ever divulge the proprietary ingredients that went into their manufacture. My system might never survive the shock

So there you have it, my introduction to the first real innovation in guitar design to come along in many a moon balanced between two wonderful breakfasts. Surely this is as perfect a piece of synchronicity as you are ever likely to find. What more could we ask for. :>)

Gordon Roberts
Flaxwood North America