My name is Jeff Nantais and I build electric guitars and basses in Toronto, one at a time.
No automation is used to make them. No CNC, no pantograph, no production run. Bandsaws, jointers, planers and hand tools — which is a slower and less forgiving way to work, and the reason no two instruments that leave here are the same.
But the tools are the last part of the story. Every instrument starts as a question about purpose: what is this thing for, what does it need to play, what should it feel like in the hands of the person holding it. The answer isn't arrived at in a straight line, and it isn't arrived at on paper alone — it comes out of thinking about the player, the shape, the balance and the wood all at once, until they stop arguing with each other.
I number them Sequentially rather than name a model, because there is no model. Sequent 001 is a headless multiscale seven-string I built because I wanted one and couldn't buy it. Sequent 014 is a hollowbody with steam-bent maple sides and a hand-carved ebony harp tailpiece. Sequent 019 is a semi-hollow eight-string with a bloodwood top and a steam-bent headstock plate. They share a maker and a philosophy. Other than a few of my signature design elements - like the S-curve blade and spoke wheel trussrod adjuster port at the end of my fretboards - they share almost nothing else.
How I got here
I've been playing guitar since I was barely capable of fretting my dad's bass, or reaching over the top of his Martin Vega dreadnaught. My first electric was a Lake Placid Blue Squier Stratocaster. While that guitar was good to me (I still own it today), it is a product from a production line. It is a tool with no soul. One of thousands that came out of that Young-Chang factory. After decades of owning playable, budget-friendly guitars - I always wanted to have a guitar that was unique. One-of-one. A melding of art, form and function.
By day I'm involved in the tech industry. As my business world became more and more virtual - my own personal passion to make sounds and music needed to be less and less. My electronic music work came back out of the computer and went analog. modular synthesizers. sound design tools that are physical. When the stars aligned and all the pieces fell in place to start building my own guitars - I decided to keep that analog as well. Continuously learning all the old ways. Working with my hands. The only thing I use a computer for when I build a guitar is a simple drawing program to print out 1:1 shapes, and complex calculations for multiscale fretboards. Working with wood by hand is therapeutic.
How I work
It starts with purpose
Before anything else there's a question: what is this instrument for? Not what specification does it meet — what kind of playing does it serve, what music is it for, what should it feel like, and what should it make the person holding it feel. An instrument built to a spec sheet is a competent object. An instrument built to an intention is a different thing entirely, and it's the only kind I'm interested in making.
It doesn't happen in a straight line
I'd like to tell you it proceeds in tidy stages — define the purpose, draw the shape, choose the wood. It doesn't. Character, feel, balance, outline and material are all tangled together, and they resolve together.
Sometimes the design leads and then demands a particular material: this one needs a dark, tight grain, or a specific colour, and nothing else will do. Other times it runs the opposite way entirely — I'll be looking at a board I've had on the rack for two years and it announces itself. I was made for this guitar idea. Both are legitimate starting points. What matters is that by the end, the purpose, the shape and the wood are all saying the same thing.
Katalox, bloodwood, ziricote, purpleheart, ovangkol, Rhodesian teak, black-and-white ebony — I hand select figured and exotic stock and let it sit until the right instrument comes along. Like the ink blot images of a Rorschach test, sometimes cutting a bookmatched top reveals a pattern that can define a guitar - like the Katalox top on #014, where the separation between heartwood and sapwood defines the acoustic openings; or the elegant heart found on the Sapele back of #019.
No bolt-on necks
Everything here is set-neck or neck-through-body. A bolt-on neck is a fine piece of engineering for a factory — it makes an instrument that can be assembled from bins, finished separately, and fixed by swapping a part. Those are manufacturing virtues, not playing ones. A set neck or a neck-through-body is more difficult to produce and can't be corrected after the fact, but is far more elegant and gives you a single continuous structure from tuner to bridge. If I'm only building one of a thing, there's no reason to accept the compromise.
Construction is the design
Multi-ply necks with wenge and purpleheart stringers. Scarf-jointed headstocks with volutes, because a one-piece tilt-back headstock is a break waiting to happen and wastes wood. Carbon fibre stiffening rods and dual-action truss rods. Stainless steel fretwork, which outlasts nickel by a wide margin and costs more to install. Neck tenons cut at angle to a matched mortise — the harder method, and the one that holds.
The finish is not a coating
Nearly everything here is finished in satin Osmo hard wax oil: a low-VOC finish made from natural plant-based oils and hard waxes that penetrates into the wood rather than sitting on top of it. Dyes, where used, are alcohol-based. It's a deliberate departure from the glossy polyester or toxic nitrocellulose tradition the industry inherited from car manufacturing. It looks waxed rather than plastic-wrapped, it feels like wood, shows imperfections and exposes its nature. When it's damaged it can be spot-repaired at a bench instead of refinished in a booth.
One of one
An instrument that exists once is a different object from one that exists ten thousand times. It carries decisions rather than specifications — this top because of that grain, this scale length because of how you play, this tailpiece because nothing off the shelf was right.
That's the whole idea. Every Sequent is entered in a build register with its number, its materials, and its date. When one sells it stays in the archive, because the archive is the work.
See the guitars · See the basses
The studio
My small, humble luthierie studio is in the basement of my house. It sits next to my recording studio. I made an investment in extensive dust collection so I could keep my luthierie more in line with creating art, rather than out in the garage and feeling semi-industrial. The heart of the studio is a Laguna bandsaw with ceramic blade guides, a fence accurate enough to cut veneer, powerful enough to bookmatch a 7" wide piece of Katalox, and so much safer than a tablesaw (which I gave away two years ago). I also take pride in my collection of japanese rasps and razor files; and my Veritas hand planes sharpened up to 12,000 grit on Shapton stones.
None of these quite yours?
I take commissions. It starts with a conversation about what you play and what you've never been able to find.