Welcome to the hopefully positive rants of a middle aged Luthier! Well, I'm quite positive really about the development I make and the higher quality consciousness around the world and in the same time we need to step up the effort in making things that lasts much longer.

One thing that often strike me is the reason why we do things.

I believe the world in large would be a hell (pun non intended) of a better place if we are very aware of WHY we do things. Like one of my pet peeves of cutting costs when making instruments. WHY do one save €5 on a inferior truss rod when you can add €10 on it and have a trussed that holds up a lifetime or two? I suppose those €5 add up one hefty sum if you make thousands of basses. But since many of them end up in my workshop I have seen the demise of quality recent yers on important things on bass guitars.

Things that are not apparent at first glance in the shop but will be VERY expensive when it fails. Sometimes the cost of repair even surpasses the total cost of the bass itself.I we are going to have some kind of sustainability one needs to review the WHY again and dismiss these ridiculous ideas of building cheap that is going to inevitably cause unnecessary waste of raw materials. And grief for the customer. This has me gotten to a point that as a counter balance I am using methods that will stand up many decades, will write more specifically about this in later blogs.

So making things with high quality will inevitably "save the planet" in the long term. If things we make lasts four times as long as they do now (not a hard task really...) we not only waste 1/4 what we do now, we waste 1/4 of the energy, shipping pollutions, we spend more time per product as well, less stress in the workplace frantically trying to make more stuff to expand also. In my eyes a better world. Yes, my basses starts at €5000 (€4000 export price) so they are not "cheap". But they are worth every penny. Every instrument contains dozens of loving labour, precision engineering. extremely well balanced tone. You can feel it when you pick it up. Its made with love and passion. In service to bass players around the world. Theres quite a few that has gotten what I'm about and far more that hasn't. Yet. 🙂

Thanks for reading! And the story continues! ´til next time! 🙂

All the best! / Christian Olsson