Herndon Shop Repairs and Builds Custom Guitars Made in America

Fifty years ago the British stormed the states and turned Rock and Roll on its head. Bands like The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones influenced every kid with a guitar or drumsticks across our nation and changed the genre forever.

Decades later at the turn of the 21^st Century, London guitarist Graham Drew and his lead singer wife, Tania Sebastian followed suit of their English predecessors and crossed the pond with their own dream of making a living in America via Rock and Roll.

After a successful nine years playing in bands and repairing guitars in Florida, Drew and his family moved to Herndon where he set up his repair shop, Jade Guitars and added a second business building custom instruments two years later called Drew and Sebastian Custom Electric Guitars and Basses.

“The majority of it is the repair shop and the custom guitars in still really in its infancy. When I opened the repair shop I had a lot of people would ask ‘can you build me a guitar?’” Drew said. “So, I started offering a building service as a part of the repair shop where people could have pick their own body, pickups [etc.] and that’s how I started doing it.”

Drew and Sebastian may be a young company but it has found quick success as Drew just completed building his 21^st instrument in a little more than a year. However, Drew has been “tearing apart and rebuilding” his own guitars since the age of 14 and always found he had the skill set for designing and making instruments and one day he got his shot professionally.

“This customer said he was retiring and was going to treat himself to a custom bass and I jokingly said ‘why don’t you let me build you one?’” Drew said. “And he said ‘yea, OK why don’t we do that.’ And that was really the start of it all.”

Drew offers a variety of looks and technical designs for any one guitar and may build as many as three or four separate instruments based off of one classic-look.  He grew up playing mostly Fender guitars and bases many of his own designs off of the famous Stratocaster.

“We have a guitar that looks a bit like a Stratocaster called an Avatar and we have one that looks like a Telecaster, which is called a Europa,” he said. “We wanted to come up with something that people will remember. My son and I were going through a book of the solar system one night and we came across one of the moons of Jupiter which is called Europa and that set off a little light bulb over my head.”

If one of his guitars may not be exactly what his customer is looking for, then he will tailor it to his or her precise needs. One slight change here or there allows Drew to build limitless designs.

“With the Europa, we can make it look exactly like a vintage Telecaster,” Drew says. “Or we can have it with two humbuckers (pickup with higher output) and a Strat-type bridge and no pick guard and body contours, with stuff you wouldn’t find on a Telecaster.”

The luthier has built guitars by hand from step one before but discovered he could save time for the customer and man hours at his shop by hiring an outside manufacturer to shape the body and ship the parts to his business, where he then builds the instrument originally designed.

“Having an outside manufacturer making bodies and necks for us is good,” he said. “We proudly put on our instruments that they’re made in the USA and the final assembly point is here in Virginia (Drew & Sebastian).”

The repair side of his business is what he calls “the bread and butter” of his shop. Jade Guitars is an authorized repair center for Fender, Takamine, Taylor, Ovation, Washburn and many other top manufacturers. Drew decided on the name of his business after playing in a band with his wife called Jade Fox.

Drew’s career turned into repairing and building instruments for others in 2000 when he met a guitar builder in London during a difficult time in his life. Drew's father was dying of pancreatic cancer and he flew to England to visit him.

“I said ‘I’m going to come home’ and he basically told me not to come home and said ‘I’ll tell you when it’s time to come home. You have the opportunity to do something that I never had the opportunity to do, so stay out there and make the most of it,’” Drew said. “I called him every day and asked when to come over and he would say ‘no, I’m fine you don’t need to come yet’ and then my step-mom called me and said ‘If you’re going to come, come now.’”

Drew took the next flight to London and was able to spend time with his father. The following day his father passed away. While there, Drew was able to gain something positive when met a British luthier named Bernie Goodfellow who showed him how to refine his skills and build guitars properly.

“When I came back to the states a few months later it had given me the confidence to start doing it proper to be able to do it,” he said. “I was able to step it up a bit doing repairs more seriously, but didn’t actually go the whole hog until we moved to Virginia three years ago.”

The entrepreneur has played in more than a dozen bands including a Pink Floyd cover band he fronted for two years when he moved to Herndon called Echoes. Drew wanted to do it right and performed with all of the bells and whistles Floyd uses when they perform. However, he found it difficult to book gigs because few venues wanted or were able to fit their needs to perform.

“The reason I started playing guitar was because of Pink Floyd. We would play in Northern Virginia and Baltimore. But our drummer was sent to Afghanistan which put a bit of a damper on it,” Drew said. “We had a sax player and a girl background singer and it was a dream come true. I always wanted to be David Gilmour when I was a kid.”

The guitarist has actually switched to playing bass the past two years for the band drumfish. He feels he fits the band well with his style and influence from Rush’s Geddy Lee, Robert DeLeo of Stone Temple Pilots and Level 42’s Mark King. The band will be playing later this month in Northern Virginia and a schedule can be found through Drew’s website, http://www.drewandsebastian.com/.

As far as he future is concerned, Drew wants to continue playing guitar and bass for the rest of his life and has several business prospects on his plate at the moment, which could vault Drew and Sebastian into the upper echelon of guitar making.

“I’d certainly like to keep playing. Joining drumfish recently has been great for me. One thing I’d forgotten about being a bass player is you turn up, plug it in and play,” he said. “As with the custom guitars, I would like to see those in the hands of as many people as I can. I’m looking into several options of people who are famous players who I can’t name at the moment. So, that's kind of where we are right now and I’m hoping that comes through because if that happens, then the world is your oyster.

For information on Jade Guitar repairs and Drew & Sebastian, visit: http://www.jadeguitars.org/ and

http://www.drewandsebastian.com/