We originally started stocking Godin in any depth about ten years ago. Those of you out there who remember the Buster Jones gig at the Griffin know what great guitars they are. Many of our customers are owners of these fine instruments so we are probably preaching to the converted.They are a real niche product and well worth checking out. The single most important to consider is these guitars are made in North America. Any other guitar would be much much more expensisive. Combine this with the superb build quality and innovative features and you simply must take a look. We have now decided to stock the guitar again. My prediction all the staff will own one within a few months. This is what the Godin Website has to say for itself:
If this is your first visit to Godin, we’d like to take a few minutes to introduce ourselves. We started building guitars over twenty years ago in a village in Quebec Canada called La Patrie. The man that started it all is Robert Godin. Robert still owns the company and he continues to design the vast majority of our guitars.
We are a Canadian company with our head office located in Montreal and we build our guitars in several different locations, five in Quebec and one in New Hampshire. For those of you keeping score, that adds up to six factories spread out over about 1000 kilometers. So why not just have one giant guitar factory? Although there are some obvious inconveniences associated with spreading ourselves out this much, the up-side is that these smaller operations promote a more intimate working environment which gets everybody more involved and this is reflected in the instruments themselves.
Godin guitars are assembled in our Richmond, Quebec and Berlin, New Hampshire factories. The necks and bodies are all made in our original location in La Patrie, Quebec.
We are also known for our other guitar brands which include our new electric line known as Richmond Guitars, as well as our acoustic brands which include: Seagull, Simon & Patrick, Norman, LaPatrie and Art & Lutherie.
From the beginning the company has been more or less divided between our acoustic side and electric side. The electric side of our business was originally that of a parts supplier to other guitar companies. We built their necks and bodies. You might be amazed to find out how many different guitar brands are all being produced in the same handful of factories. We’re not telling you this because we want to divulge somebody’s secrets but simply to let you know where we’re coming from. In any case, what started out as some generic replacement necks and bodies soon evolved into a major business producing finished necks and bodies for many established U.S. guitar companies. The great thing about this is the tremendous experience that we gained building all of these instruments to their various specifications. The down side is that the sub-contracting business is a pain in the neck, so to speak, but more importantly it does not include the best part of building new guitars and that is: coming up with new designs and coaxing them through the process that begins with a sketch and ends with the music.
New Guitar Concepts
Unlike many other instruments that follow a fairly strict set of design parameters-such as most orchestral instruments-guitars truly lend themselves to variation in design. This capacity for variation manifests itself in two distinct ways, there is the purely visual variation such as, the lightning-bolt-shaped-pointy-headstock-you’re-obviously-not-in-an-easy-listening-band guitar. In other words, guitars as fashion statements. Don’t get us wrong, we are committed to high aesthetic values in all of our designs but what we find most compelling is the other type of variation inspired by the endless musical possibilities in guitar design. From designing a Nylon string guitar that can be played at stage volumes and feel comfortable to a primarily steel string player (Multiacs) to the creation of the multiple-voice instruments in our Signature Series, exploring new design possibilities is an integral part of what we do. The Godin commitment to new guitar concepts is typified in the Glissentar which is so much of a variation on the standard guitar that it isn’t even a guitar anymore and qualifies as a whole new instrument. The Glissentar project was not born out of a marketing meeting (i.e.) “Man, I bet if we built an eleven string fretless acoustic/electric we could sell a boatload of them.” Instead the Glissentar was conceived because of the intriguing musical possibilities it promised and hearing some amazing Glissentar performances from musicians like Michel Cusson, Fareed Haque, and Sylvain Luc (to name a few) that deliver on that promise truly makes the exercise worthwhile.
