About Us
About us
“Creating original guitars out of reclaimed and locally sourced woods”
Hi! My name is Remko Drubbel and I’m the person behind all of the Mr.Drubbel Guitars and basses. As I build guitars, you could say; that I am a luthier, but: I see myself as a guitar and bass creator. An instrument starts its journey in my crazy brain and ends up as a finished product ready to be played by a musician. That’s the easy way of saying it…
I’ve been building and repairing guitars for over 20 years. It started with changing strings, doing setups and every other type of repair in a music store in Amsterdam and later as an independent guitar tech. The first instrument I build was a 5-string bass. It looked like something out of a Syfy movie, but it was playable, and I still have it today. After this came a lot of parts casters and full builds.
I’ve built guitars and basses out of many kinds of woods. The last couple of years I started to experiment with old wood. I bought old pine tables, mahogany doors and made guitars out of them. The guitars sounded just as good and sometimes even better then when i built them out of newer wood.
Starting from 2021 I only build instruments out of reclaimed or wood that was grown in Europe. The reason for this is simple; enough trees have been cut down and transported all over the globe. If I can, I will use reclaimed wood. Otherwise, the wood I use has its origin in Europe and has been respectfully sourced and grown.
This all brought me where to where Mr.Drubbel Guitars is today. I try to create instruments that sound good, look fantastic and above all play exceptionally well and will hopefully last longer than a lifetime.
The first ones
As most guitar builders i build my first guitars out of wood that was bought from tonewood suppliers. I used American maple and Alder. Which are proven good woods to build guitars from.
The first time i build a guitar from reclaimed timber was in 2016. I changed my workbench to a bigger one and at the same time was reading about how Leo Fender build the first Telecaster out of pine and that he actually liked it better then Alder. He chose Alder in the end because of production issues. Pine is softer and has more knots, so it dents faster in the productions chain and the knots take more time to seal.
My old workbench was a pine table… I decided to give it try and build four bodies out of this table and called them TableCasters! Worked out very good. I liked ,and still like very much the resonance and light weight of pine. It’s my favorite wood for guitar bodies.
