Tosin Abasi performs with the eight-string guitar he designed from the ground up. Animals As Leaders frontman Tosin Abasi, one of the early adopters of ergonomic, extended-range guitar designs, has...
Tosin Abasi performs with the eight-string guitar he designed from the ground up.
Animals As Leaders frontman Tosin Abasi, one of the early adopters of ergonomic, extended-range guitar designs, has officially launched a new company, Abasi Guitars. The company's instruments, which were conceived and designed by Abasi, will be manufactured by veteran luthier Frank Falbo at his shop in Ventura, California.
Falbo, founder of Falbo Guitars, is a member of Fishman's R&D team and a former vice president of product development at Seymour Duncan. Andy Alt—Steve Vai's marketing director and the creator of A Little Thunder pickups—represents the final third of the Abasi Guitars team. Alt has worked in a marketing capacity for Plini, Intervals and other progressive, guitar-based acts, not to mention several contemporary retail and tech brands.
If you follow guitar-based news, trends and social media, you might've seen Abasi's flagship design before; at one point, the guitarist was in talks with Ibanez to release it as Abasi's latest extended-range Ibanez signature guitar, following the popular TAM10 and TAM100 models. In the end, however, Abasi realized—along with Falbo and Alt—that his design was bigger than just one model with eight strings.
From left, Frank Falbo, Tosin Abasi and Andy Alt in Falbo's shop.
"[Ibanez] was down to do it, but the prototyping process just proved to be really lengthy," Abasi told Guitar World last week. "It’s not the fault of Ibanez—it’s just the reality of large-scale manufacturing. Also, once you plug something like locking tuners into the actual math of the whole supply chain, you’re quadrupling the cost of that particular feature. So things like that made it cost prohibitive to design the guitar exactly the way I wanted, even though we