Strandberg Boden Original NX 7

F
or many people, Sweden is the home
of thoughtful, elegant design. From
vintage Saab cars to furniture from
flatpack-icon IKEA, the signature style of
Swedish manufacturing is a purposeful
minimalism where sleek looks combine
with high-level functionality. And so it
proves with .strandberg guitars, too. Based
in the city of Uppsala, near Stockholm,
the company is the brainchild of Ola
Strandberg, who was kind enough to join
us for a chat about the guitars he’s been
building and refining since the early 80s.
Why did you adopt a non-traditional,
headless design for .strandberg guitars?
“It started as a hobby. I built guitars in my
teens and had not looked at a guitar for
almost 15 years. I was kind of shocked after
those 15 years when I decided to make
myself another guitar, and went to my
favourite music store and, looking around,
nothing had happened. That was kind of
a shock… the Tube Screamer was still the
favourite overdrive pedal, which I had used
years before.
“So I guess that was like the first seed
of, ‘let’s make something different’, but
then I kind of slipped into it because I was
attracted to the headless concept. I had
owned a Hohner Steinberger copy back
in the day, which I had butchered. I built a
new body and neck for it, but I reused the
original hardware. I was attracted to that
concept, so when I started planning my
own guitar I wanted to make it headless and
I just realised that there was no headless
hardware to buy anywhere.
“Then I stumbled on this community
called Building the Ergonomic Guitar,
which was an online community of a few
guitar builders. They were trying to do
something different and solve a problem,
not just build a guitar. I was attracted to
come up with a compelling offering for
ergonomics’. It started there.”
Tell us about the neck profile. It’s a really
remarkable shape…
“Yes, the original idea was inspired by a bass
builder called Jerome Little, who designed
what he called the Torzal Twist neck,
where the neck is actually twisted, so as you
extend your arm you can straighten your
wrist. That seemed to make a lot of sense,
but at the same time it’s a very complicated
construction – it’s very hard to manufacture.
Lace Music Products, who make the Lace
Sensor Pickups, actually had a commercially
available guitar with this twisted neck. I had
the opportunity to visit them in California
and talk to them. They showed me this neck
and it was obvious it worked in terms of
ergonomics. At the same time, you’d have to
adapt your playing technique because you
can’t bend upwards. If you bend upwards
you’ll choke the strings, so you can only
bend downwards. That would be a huge
limitation. The other limitation is if you need
The guitars built by .strandberg may look unconventional but they are designed to be
more ergonomic and playable than guitars of the past, says founder Ola Strandberg
Words Jamie Dickson
that as well, so that kind of became the
project: not just build a guitar for myself but
to solve this problem of guitar ergonomics
and in such a way that I would want to be a
customer [for what I was building].
“I also had a long background in
the software industry and product
development and management overall.
So that made me think up this product
concept, which I named the Ergonomic
Guitar System, which featured [tiered]
levels of ergonomics. First, I would make
hardware that would allow you to convert
your existing hardware to make it lighter
and more ergonomic. The second level
of the Ergonomic Guitar System was a
replacement neck that you could fit to
replace the neck of your existing guitar.
Then level three of the Ergonomic Guitar
System was the entire guitar – the guitar
body shape that I had come up with.
“I don’t think the decision was necessarily
to make something untraditional. The
decision was more one of ‘approach
this as an industrial design project and
Headless Norseman
“It seems weird for a
few minutes but then
quickly becomes
second nature…”
The new NX Concept series is
made up of a number of models,
including this Boden Metal NX 6,
designed to “deliver an organic and
woody yet pulverizing high-gain
tone for today’s most demanding
metal genres”, says .strandberg
.STRANDBERG BODEN ORIGINAL NX 6
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GUITAR IST DECEMBER 2021
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