How did the Tschabo come to be?

A Saturday in spring. Time for the things that don’t usually fit into everyday life – and for a moment that would change ours. I was standing in the workshop with my colleague Vadim. Vadim has been with us for many years: Georgian, guitar maker, musician, artist.

"Martin," Vadim began, "I’ve asked you so many times if we should build an electric guitar, and you always say: ‘Yes, maybe, but not yet… I don’t have the decisive idea. If we build something electric, it has to have hollow chambers – I owe that to our acoustic guitars.’"

"I once built a guitar like that for a friend in Paris," Vadim said. He took out his phone, scrolled through his photos, and finally found that one guitar that I liked immediately.

That was the beginning of the project. From then on, we discussed how the new guitar should be – how it should look, feel, and of course sound and be named. ‘Tschabo’ is a word from the local Manic dialect of our region. It means friend, companion, and good guy. ‘Tschabo’ was to become our new electric guitar model. Our project now had a name. The first ‘Tschabos’ were built – unmistakable one-of-a-kind instruments.