00:00One of the things I decided when I wanted to start my own business is I said if I'm
00:05going to be at the top of my game, I need to be where the top players are.
00:10So the choices for me were New York, L.A. or Nashville.
00:14And given I'm a New York boy, that's where I went home.
00:19But I really think if you do want to play at a certain level in this industry, you have
00:25to be where the top players are.
00:28You need their feedback of what's working for them, either live or in the studio.
00:34I think it's hard to be way out in the middle of nowhere and have that kind of interaction
00:39with your artists.
00:40So that's what's kept me there.
00:43But then after 23 years, we got priced out of Manhattan.
00:46I went to Brooklyn for 10 years, got priced out of a trendy neighborhood in Brooklyn.
00:51And now we're in Long Island City in Queens, right across the East River.
00:55Well, again, I started making guitars in 79, basses in 82.
01:01I always tried to keep a 50-50 balance of repair and restoration work and building.
01:06And I always intended my business to sell direct to the player.
01:11I wasn't looking to have a factory.
01:13I was an artisanal guitar maker.
01:17And that's the level I always wanted to keep it at.
01:20Plus, I wanted that one-in-one connection with the people who were buying my instruments.
01:27Honestly, selling to a buyer for a music store was not what got me excited.
01:33It was the whole creative process of meeting with the player, what's working for you, what's
01:38not working for you.
01:42And so that relationship, that direct relationship, has always been very important to me.
01:47But in 87, I connected with a boutique distributor in Japan named Okada International.
01:55So I've been sending instruments to Japan on a monthly basis ever since then.
02:02But in 2000 and, I'm going to, no, in 1991, there was a guitar maker, a bass maker in
02:12Japan named Yoshi Kikuchi, who was very much an admirer of my instruments.
02:18And he approached my distributor, and they hired him, and they sent, he came to New York
02:24and spent a year working by my side, learning how I do things.
02:29And then he went back to Japan, and under the umbrella of my distributor, we started
02:33a small production in Japan.
02:35We didn't use any of the existing factories.
02:38We found veterans of the fading guitar industry in Japan at that time, and we put our own
02:45workshop together.
02:46And that created my Metro line of basses.
02:49And so that's our dealer line.
02:51So they're extremely high quality, artisanal made, as well as what I do in New York.
02:57We keep it affordable by limiting the options.
03:02We don't do fancy wood options like I do in my New York shop.
03:06So they just represent the basic models of everything I make, and that is the line that
03:12we sell to dealers worldwide.
03:14And in my shop, I still primarily deal direct and take a much more artisanal approach.
03:19I have a fantastic inventory of woods I've been collecting for 50 years, and so the balance
03:27works out very well.
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