The Allure of Toronto’s Frank Brothers Guitar Company
Meet the band of brothers building modern instruments with a vintage look.
The form of a musical piece involves structure: harmony and melody, the presence or absence of repeating sections, all influence the overall piece. The same elements of omission and inclusion, of inspiration and innovation go into crafting the instruments the composition is brought to life on. For Frank Brothers Guitar Company, a family-owned and -operated luthier in Toronto, music is an inheritance. The eponymous brothers Tim, Nick, and Jon can look to their father, an award-winning recording engineer, and grandfather, a violin virtuoso, for their own infatuation with music and the inspiration behind their guitar-making business.
The Frank Brothers Guitar lineup consists of the Radar, Sonar, and flagship Arcade. The Arcade’s look, and that of the entire range, harks back to the iconic guitars of the 1950s and ’60s, but Tim notes that they were inspired by “really interesting twists on the classics,” including low-cost models from Australia and Japan. The small-scale operation and hands-on production methods mean Frank Brothers is able to customize all its standard guitars and produce a series called Brothers Choice—one-off designs. “One of us will spec out a guitar as if we were making a custom for ourselves, and we’ll make that guitar, and we’ll put it out there into the world,” Tim says. The musical history of the Frank family and the memories of the guitars they grew up playing are all evident in the brothers’ output. The result, as Tim Frank puts it, is something “familiar but different.”
