Take a young businessman, add a love of Hawaiian music and a fascination with making fine objects with wood and what do you get?
The answer is apparent as soon as you descend the steps to the basement of Tom Wolansky’s St. Albert home, where boxes containing ukuleles and acoustic lap slide guitars called the Weissenborns are stacked to the ceiling.
“In this day and age, it is surprising I could find a niche in the music industry, because I have to compete with the Martins, Gibsons, Fenders and Taylors,” he says, indicating that his young company called Twisted Wood Guitars is finding early success in the highly competitive world, after a few of years of struggle.
“I have probably a hundred guitars in this room and probably 250 in total. About 87 of them are Weissenborns, due to the fact that we are in 10 stores now in Canada and the U.S. We have them in stores in Arizona, New York and Montreal.”
Wolansky, whose retired father was a St. Albert firefighter, came up with the idea of starting a musical instrument company about six years ago. The company is named after their favourite hiking trail near Duncan, B.C., where his dad, Chris, and his wife, Diane, now live.
The origins of the business go back much further than that. As a young boy, Wolansky often worked on projects with his dad who had also been a cabinetmaker.
Listening to music played on a Weissenborn during a trip to Hawaii about 15 years ago inspired him. Played with a tone bar sliding on its six strings, the instrument produces a unique sweet and woody tone.
“It was a very popular Hawaiian instrument in the 1920s,” he says. “There was a gentleman named Herman Weissenborn who fell in love with the style and brought it back to California where he patented it. Then it fell out of popularity for a few years because there wasn’t that big name player.”
As time went by, people also began associating Weissenborns with the pedal steel guitar, made popular in country music. But, of course, it is a different instrument, now played by underground musicians, such as Current Swell, who have taken a plugged-in version of a Twisted Wood guitar to many countries.
Wolansky, who also plays guitar, received a vintage Weissenborn as a gift about 11 years ago, but later sold it to raise money for tuition.
“I played slide guitar not knowing what special type of instrument I was holding at the time,” he says. “Needing money for university, I put it up for sale and had about 17 calls in five minutes.”
When he later tried to buy another one, he found that not only were they very expensive, but also quite rare. So he decided to build one. Later, during a sleepless night, he came up with the idea of starting a small company to produce an affordable copy.
“I asked myself what is the best way to share them with people.”
The international business and supply chain management grad started building Weissenborns with his father in their basement workshop, later taking them on the summer festival circuit, where he was soon asked if he had any ukuleles for sale. The diminutive sibling of the guitar has been going through a renaissance in the past decade, thanks in part to a viral YouTube video of virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro playing While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
Wolansky still hand-builds some instruments, but because of the time needed, they cost anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000. His factory models start at about $360 for the lap slide guitars and at about $180 for ukuleles. The prices of both go up according to the woods used and the style of the instruments.
“I worked with builders all over North America and all over overseas,” he says. “Making an instrument affordable was the real task. We still build instruments in-house but the cost sometimes exceeds many people’s budget and I believe music is meant to be shared with everyone not just with the people who can afford to play.”
In order to do this, he needed both a secure and affordable supply of sustainably gathered tone woods – such as Hawaiian koa, mahogany, zebra wood and spruce – and a factory that produced work up to his standards. At first he worked with instrument builders in Ontario and on Vancouver Island.
“Unfortunately the quality was just not at the level we were willing to put out in the market so we had to look elsewhere,” he says “After many failures we found success, a way to put an affordable and amazing instrument in people’s hands, they can afford.”
He’s not about to tell anyone where he gets his wood or where his builder is situated, other than to say the factory is in China.
Wolansky recently enjoyed a proud moment when a local news show featured an inner city program in Edmonton that encourages people in need through music. Like a proud papa, he noticed they were playing his zebra wood ukes.
“For me, the biggest accomplishment is just getting people playing,” he says. “There are countless numbers of people who can pick up a ukulele and in five minutes be playing a song, because it is simple. It is affordable, so it is not going to break the bank and ukuleles, too, are funny for me because the whole thing started with the Weissenborns.”
Twisted Wood instruments are available in Edmonton at Myhre’s Music, Acoustic Music Shop and online at www.twistedwood.com.
