George Furlanetto’s bass guitar business is 45 years old and booming
On one side of the two-storey building is an industrial gas company with a parking lot packed with tanker trucks.
On the other side is a railway line that shakes the rafters when trains rumble past.
Across the street, that is long overdue for a paving job, is a fenced field where old cars go to die.
It seems like an unlikely neighbourhood to make beautiful musical instruments that are renowned around the world.
But there it is - the headquarters of F Bass guitars, at 16 McKinstry St., off Burlington Street, a kilometre from the coke ovens of Stelco. An oasis of wood creation in a city of steel.
And business is booming at the 5,000 square foot plant. Celebrating its 45th year, F Bass is riding a wave of popularity that many high-end instrument makers have been experiencing since COVID began.
It seems like everybody has been sitting at home on their computer saying, I've got nothing to do. I might as well order a bass,'" says George Furlanetto who started the company in 1978.
Through the pandemic it has been crazy. We went from being able to complete orders in three months before COVID to 14 months now."
Furlanetto is 71 years old and has been slowly handing the reins of the company to his 35-year-old son Marcel who carries the title of CEO. It's hard for George to step away from the business to enjoy his golden years. He still loves working the machines and gets a kick out of seeing people play his instruments.
He says he recently saw one on the television program The Voice" and another being used in a backing band behind country singer Kelly Clarkson. He figures there are more than 4,000 bass guitars around the world that came out of his shop.
And like children that have left home, he likes to hear how they are doing. Many are in Asia as well as in Europe and across North America.
Today, Furlanetto's business has 10 employees that make close to 200 instruments a year that sell for between $4,000 to $12,000.
He recently hired a luthier from Brazil who is about to join the payroll. The plan is for him to handle the technical expertise that George has been providing over the years. That should make it possible for George to retire, or at least step away from day-to-day operations.
Born in Italy in a community near Venice before moving to Hamilton as a boy, George says his interest in building musical instruments can be traced to his parents. His father was good with his hands and his mother loved music and had a glorious singing voice.
My dad bought me a $15 Kent acoustic guitar, so I started working on that to make it better," he says.
I made a new body for it. Then I started fixing guitars for friends."
Eventually, he landed a job doing instrument repairs at Waddington's music on John Street, working there from 1969 to 1976, before going out on his own. Through all that experience he gained the confidence to build his own instruments.
It just came out of my love for making things and playing guitar," he says.
He started with six-string electric guitars. But too many other people were making those. He saw a better future in basses and he had some ideas about how to improve Fender models that dominated the market. At the same time, as a musician, he migrated to playing the bass, rather than guitar.
He still performs as a bassist, most notably with a wedding and special events band called Daybreak.
George had some lean years from the late 1980s until the early 2000s while the company also ran a vintage instrument shop and repair operation called the Guitar Clinic" at the same McKinstry Street building. He decided the best way forward was to focus exclusively on building instruments, get out of retail sales and leave instrument repairs to someone else. Today, repairs are managed by a separate company under the same roof, called The Peghead, owned by Michael Spicer.
Most Hamiltonians probably haven't heard of F Bass guitars. But professional bassists tend to know them well. The instruments get a fair bit of attention online, at trade shows and in musician magazines.
And it helps that several notable players are using them onstage.
People like the virtuoso jazz bassist Alain Caron, who worked with George to come up with the Alain Caron model (AC6) which is described as having the tone of a solid body fretless with the dynamic characteristics of an acoustic guitar." Dave McMillan of Big Wreck plays one, as does Charles Spearin of Broken Social Scene and Jon Harvey of Monster Truck. Tom Hamilton from Aerosmith has an F Bass as does Myron Dove, a former bassist of Santana, among many other notable players.
We have a whole slew of young bassists coming out of Berklee (College of Music in Boston). Most of them are not familiar to me but my son knows them all."
Most F basses have five strings, as opposed to the traditional four. The company also makes six-string models.
As a side project many years ago, George created 12-string Octave guitar, he named Hammertone, as a homage to Hamilton. It's the opposite of a bass - it's small like a mandolin, high-pitched and rings with a ching rather than a thud.
The instruments currently sell for about $2,000. Some musicians who play them include Michael League of Snarky Puppy, Michel Cusson of UZEB, Bob Egan of Blue Rodeo, Bob Mothersbaugh of Devo and Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies.
A 1990s model Hammertone previously owned by Mike Campbell, the long-time guitarist with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, is currently for sale on the musical instrument online marketplace Reverb. The asking price is whopping $14,000 which may explain why it hasn't sold after five months.
There is a certificate of authenticity about Campbell having owned the instrument, and the online advertisement shows pictures of him playing the red-coloured instrument on stage with Petty at a concert.
As for Marcel Furlanetto's future plans as he takes over control of the business, he says he is generally pleased with the company as it is. He hopes to see more social media presence and further improvements to the company's website.
He thinks the business is a good size in its present form and there are no immediate plans to move from the building between the tanker trucks and the railroad tracks.