His passion for strumming the guitar led him to design them
Akshit Garg
With buskers happily parked on pavements and a music bar popping up at every nook and crevice, Bengaluru’s Church Street is adding to the creation of a sort of live street music culture, if you will. Amidst the bustle, 24-year-old city boy, Akshit Garg not only strums lively tunes but has turned his passion into designing guitars that amateurs and pros across the city are now picking up.
Ever since he stumbled upon MTV, Lucky Ali and his brother’s collection of Metallica and Led Zeppelin CDs, Akshit has been drawn to music like a moth to fire. “I was like any other kid exploring the high school music scene and eventually, tried to form ‘bands’ in college,” he explains. But the love of guitars and the sound of them drove him to design his own breed. After his MBA at SMU in the city, he landed a job as a senior sales manager at a music store. “An unethical business environment where bad quality instruments were sold at high margins especially to beginners, thrived. There wasn’t a genuine avenue for music and it was just about sales at the end of the day,” says Akshit, who soon quit his job to pick woods, the bracing, coats, colours and finishes for his guitars. “We realised that an average beginner is looking for the cheapest instrument – with a good balance between price and quality, this is what we kept in mind while optimising our own,” says the youngster who even toured across China to pick on vendors who would customise it according to specifications. “Now, I’m working towards building custom guitars with fine woods for a niche market,” he says about his brand, that also houses other rare stringed instruments like banjos, mandolins, djembes, moorchangs and ukes aside of the more popular guitar accessories, the least expensive of them all standing at Rs 6,500.
Although musicians like Michael Anthony from Mad Orange Fireworks, electronic music producer Lubomir Jabbanda, Burning Deck’s Sandeep Madhavan and Ritwik Bhattacharya are regulars, it’s not all about making a guitar or selling it that counts for Akshit. This space is now a musician’s popular jaunt for mini concerts too. “We have spot on performances all the time. Recently, we had Riaz, a college kid set the Limca Book of Records by beatboxing for 10 hours, non-stop. We are also looking at having over Parvaaz for a set soon,” he says.
When he’s not busy strumming, “I’m usually trying out all the guitars that have come in – like a kid in a candy store,” he smiles. “I’m also writing melodies and riffs, catching up with a close circle of friends, trying to finish books that I’ve dragged on for years or watch Top Gear,” he adds. Else, if you find Akshit putting out his amp at the window, he’ll probably even oblige if you ask him to play Alice in Chains’ song, Rooster. After all, that’s what stood as his inspiration.
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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