Lava Drops Guitars – Luthier Rapolas Gražys – Creating Musical Art Pieces Inspired by Nature

Rapolas Grazys, Lava Drops Guitars – Creating Musical Art Pieces Inspired by Nature.


“I believe that through the sound and resonance of the musical instrument, humans can directly connect with nature and be inspired.”

Blue Atmosphere Infinite Bass Drop


Rapolas Grazys is a creator who is always seeking to find new possibilities. He was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, and grew up in an artist family that deeply inspired him with contemporary art. However, his attention went to product design, music, technology, and materials. He graduated with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in product design and has been trying to incorporate guitars into his life ever since.

Lava Drops Guitars / Infinite Graphite Drop

Playing guitar since childhood, and his passion for design and music eventually led him to create musical instruments.
Grazys’ building philosophy is heavily inspired by nature, and he believes that through the sound and resonance of a musical instrument, humans can directly connect with nature and be inspired. He is deeply inspired by nature and modern technologies and uses materials never used in musical instrument making. Grazys’ guitar creations are made from materials such as 50 million years old black amber, meteorites, aircraft-grade aluminum, rare and sustainable wood, and different kinds of stones and gemstones.


“I select the best possible materials that transform their emotions and
experiences into Lava Drops creations.”


Grazys has specialized in industrial and one-of-a-kind product creation, high-end audio, musical instruments, and conceptual, interactive installations. He has taught design to students and is currently leading the most prominent private art school in Lithuania, where they teach people art with no limits.


“I am creating Lava Drops Guitars and, at the same time, leading the most prominent private Art School in Lithuania, where we teach people
art with no limits.”


Grazys does not label himself a luthier but rather a creator who is always seeking new ways to find new possibilities. He creates one-of-a-kind instruments that tell stories of people. His inspiration always drives him to test new materials and seek new ways to connect different types of them to reach new prospects and sonic possibilities with functional design.


“I believe that through the sound and resonance of the musical instrument, humans can directly connect with nature and be inspired.”

YouTuber, Darrell Braun, checks out one of Rapolas’ guitars.


Grazys’ signature style is minimalistic, and he creates collectible, functional musical art pieces. He shapes each guitar as an actual drop, which gives ergonomic benefits. The Lava Drops guitar shape represents his work and sets his guitars apart from others. Grazys has created four models, including the Lava Bass Drops and the electric Violin – Lava Vio Drop.

“I try to balance the simplicity and the essence with some spices of the material and design aspects.”


Grazys believes that creating instruments is like being a chef in the kitchen.


“Putting an extra sauce could dramatically change the meal, but sometimes keeping the meal simple makes the taste shine.”


Grazys balances his craft’s creative and technical aspects by continuously learning and applying new techniques to his creations. Grazys’ challenges are time-consuming and require dedication, like the Black Amber Drops crafted from 50 million years old melted black amber or connecting hardwoods with aircraft-grade aluminum.


“In my field, I always need to learn new things through a lot of tests and attempts.”


Grazys draws inspiration from nature, modern technologies, architecture, modern art, and everyday life. Inspiration is everywhere, and he uses it accordingly to create new and innovative instruments.


“Inspiration is everywhere – you just need to see it and use it accordingly.”


Rapolas Grazys is a creator who is always seeking new ways to find new possibilities. His passion for music, design, and materials has driven him to create one-of-a-kind musical art pieces that connect people with nature through sound and resonance. Grazys’ unique approach to guitar making, shaped like a drop, gives ergonomic benefits and creates a signature style that sets his instruments apart. Grazys balances simplicity with material and design aspects, creating collectible and functional art pieces. Through
his work, Grazys continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in guitar-making and inspire others to see the possibilities in their craft.

Lava Drops Guitars Hollow Flamed Maple Drop

Visit Lava Drops Guitars own home page here

Lava Drops Guitars YouTube

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Article written by Andreas Valdivia¨

GOTGuitars – The Gothenburg Guitar Show 2023

It’s time again!

GOTGUITARS – a fair for those who love guitars and music.

Welcome to buy, sell, be inspired, or dream.

Date: 25–26 March 2023

Time: Saturday 10 am–6 pm, Sunday 10 am–3 pm

Location: Auktionsverket Kulturarena, Gothenburg, Sweden

In 2022, the Gothenburg Vintage Guitar Show was a success! In 2023 we aim higher and therefore changed our name to GOTGUITARS to include even more guitars and music.

Established traders and private individuals are equally welcome. Everyone is allowed to sell and buy guitars and guitar gear. As a private, you must purchase a VIP ticket to bring an instrument to trade.

Welcome to buy, sell, be inspired, or dream.

The Auktionsverket Kulturarena can be found at the beginning of Tredje Långgatan, seen from Järntorget.

Långgatorna and Långgårdarna are old harbor quarters now Gothenburg’s most vibrant neighborhoods. Food, drinks, and coffee will be available next to the venue.

Please contact gotguitarshow@gmail.com or +46708134404 for further info.

Leif Lundback, co-show organizer and founder of No.1 Guitarshop

Team V&R visited the show in 2022. Here are a few video interviews we did with exhibiting dealers:

The Great Scandinavian Guitar Show 2022

Just came back from yet another fabulous weekend at the GSGS at Fryshuset in Stockholm. It was great to meet customers and friends from the guitar community again. The dealers had brought a lot of fantastic vintage treats for us. And the builders had been busy in the workshops creating spectacular new guitars, amps, and pedal designs.

All photos were shot with Leica Q2 and edited in Lightroom.

Gothenburg Vintage Guitar Show, April 2022

It was big excitement and anticipation that we in April 8 & 9th, 2022 went to Sweden for the first edition of the new guitar show in Scandinavia: Gothenburg Vintage Guitar Show.

The show is located in an old auction house house from the 18th century. Very beautiful facility and located in the center of town.

All photos shot with a Leica Q2 and edited in Lightroom.

1965 Fender Custom Telecaster from Woodstock Guitars (sold)
1965 Fender Custom Telecaster from Woodstock Guitars (sold)
1965 Fender Custom Telecaster from Woodstock Guitars (sold)
1990s Electro Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man from Woodstock Guitars
Kumerle Amps. – Swedish high-end boutique amps.
Fun & talks at the booth of Kumerle Amps
The booth of Nordin Guitars
Nordin Guitars
Nordin Guitars
Leif Lundback, co-show organizer and founder of No.1 Guitarshop
Jonas Axmark from Jam Gitarrer and Italian vintage collector, Roberto Cola
Interlude
Fredholm Guitars
Fredholm Guitars
Fredholm Guitars
Fredholm Guitars
Luthier on Luthier: Thomas Fredholm talking to Emily Gwynne.

1970 Gretsch 7620 Country Roc from No1 Guitarshop
Leif from Sweden Guitarworks and Umeå Guitarshow
Sweden Guitarworks
Sweden Guitarworks
Niklas and his wife from PUP Gallery
Anders Anderson – was one of the earliest sellers to join V&R in 2009.
Fredrik Sjöberg with a 1959 Fender Stratocaster. Fredrik is business partner with Anders Anderson. Visit their store on V&R here
1948 Levin Deluxe from Anders Anderson

1948 Levin Deluxe from Anders Anderson
1966 Fender Telecaster from Anders Anderson
1966 Fender Telecaster from Anders Anderson
1963 Fender Stratocaster Olympic White from Anders Anderson
Swedish vintage guitar aficionado, Stefan Lindholm with Per Ørum from Copenhagen Guitar Show
Main hall during performance
This spectacular guitar built by Swedish luthier, Sina Harthaus, sparked a lot of interest on the show
Built by Swedish luthier, Sina Harthaus Guitars.
Built by Swedish luthier, Sina Harthaus Guitars.
Built by Swedish luthier, Sina Harthaus Guitars.
1965 Fender Jaguar in custom color Fiesta Red.
1965 Fender Jaguar in custom color Fiesta Red.
1964 Fender Stratocaster in Sunburst.
1964 Fender Stratocaster in Sunburst
Gentleman doing stuff on the phone
Fredrik from Fred Ash Guitars and No1 Guitarshop.

Montreux Tausch Guitars Oversized Tstyle Demo and Review

Montreux Tausch Guitars 

– The world’s first Oversized T-style guitars have seen the light of day. And the light is shining beautiful and bright.

Rainer Tausch is the luthier and mastermind behind Tausch Guitars from Bavaria, Germany. Rainer is a highly skilled luthier for 25 years, drawing on the tradition of classic S, T, and LP style designs upgraded with his contemporary features.

In December, Rainer sent us his brand new Montreux model for us to demo.

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See the demo by Henrik & Nicolai from V&R below. The guitar is also for sale by Rainer Tausch through his V&R Shop here

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The Montreux model can best be described as an oversized T-style equipped with humbucker pickups from Häussel Pickups and finished in a two-tone sunburst reminiscent of the late ’50s and early 60´s sunburst Gibson finish. We think the choice of the two-tone Tobacco finish looks beautiful on this guitar. Upsizing the classic Tele shape is a great idea, and we found it to also works great ergonomically.

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Carl Martin I PlexiRanger – PlexiTone & Treble Booster in one pedal

The Carl Martin PlexiRanger

– A Plethora of classy Plexi-tones with a treble booster

 

Carl Martin PlexiRanger. For sale through Thomann.

 

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Throughout the years, we have had the pleasure to demo quite a few pedals from the Danish pedal company, Carl Martin.

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Their latest addition to the Carl Martin effects line-up is the PlexiRanger.

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V&R’s thoughts on using the PlexiRanger

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“I have used the Carl Martin Plexiranger since the prototype stage,” Vintage & Rare’s Henrik says, “and I found it very versatile both soundwise and as an application in a live situation. I’ve used the PlexiTone in most of my rigs the last decade or so, so I’m very familiar with it.”

“I used the Plexiranger as my main drive pedal on the last tour with Mike Tramp and the Band Of Brothers, both as a semi-clean driven crunchy sound, and as the overdriven rhythm and lead tone, using the remote option to switch the boost on/off from the Octaswitch (In my fly rig I use the Boss MS-3 which lets you assign the CTRL switches to make the switch when you change presets).”

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“I found that using the frequency and range knobs makes a huge difference when you want to place yourself in the mix. It’s a powerful tool. For example, I might boost the signal with a compressor in front of the PlexiRanger for a particular lead sound, or I could use the PlexiRanger Boost as a ‘tone shaper’ for the more driven rhythm sounds, then when playing lead I just ad the compressor in front and delay and reverb last in the chain.”

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Check out Henrik & Nicolai from V&R’s demo of the PlexiRanger.

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So what makes this pedal stand-out?

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Well, the PlexiRanger is a two-faced pedal.

It houses the renowned PlexiTone – an eerily accurate reproduction of the sound of a raging Marshall hunder-watter – alongside a treble booster section which you can use independently of the PlexiTone circuit.

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The history of the treble booster

 

Treble booster is one of those effects that most players have heard of but relatively few have on their pedalboards. Is it an EQ? Not really. Is it a fuzz? Yeah not so much. A dirty boost? Sort of but not quite. The early treble boosters were developed by companies like Dallas and Skewes as bands got louder and louder, and guitarists started to get lost amongst the low-end clutter.

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Treble boosters allowed guitarists to thin out the low end, add some teeth to the high end, and – if they wanted to – to hit the amplifier’s preamp tubes with a hotter signal, driving them to distortion. It helped to carve out a place for the guitar to dominate in a band mix, and it gave players more sustain. It even helped to open up the glorious possibilities of ear-shredding feedback.

 

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In fact, you can hear Jimmy Page talking about treble boosters in the documentary It Might Get Loud, saying; “Knowing that there was a threshold in volume, I wanted to get more sustain out of things. I’d bumped into this chap, Roger Mayer…’did I have any ideas?’ I had this record at home of a guitar that had a lot of sustain on it, and I got him to come down and have a listen to it, and I said, ‘can you get that?’. And he went away and came back with this phenomenal thing.”

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Guitarists have used treble boosters to solve all sorts of musical problems. For instance, Tony Iommi’s early Black Sabbath tone was driven by a Dallas Rangemaster treble booster into his Hiwatt amplifiers, slamming the amp’s -preamp tubes and creating the fuzzy, biting, moody, doomy sound that is unmistakably Iommi.

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And Jimi Hendrix’s sound guru, Roger Mayer, developed a treble booster combining silicon and germanium transistors in 1961 which was used by many of his local pals such as one Mr. Jimmy Page. 

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Queen’s Brian May also used treble boosters like the classic Rangemaster to get that heavenly, harmonically excited overdrive tone out of his VOX AC30 amplifiers, while Richie Blackmore plugged his into his Marshalls for his full, expressive Stratocaster tone.

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Since those glory days, amplifier design evolved to have more gain and more tone control, so there was less of a need for treble boosters. But as these things tend to go, over time, we started to hear those old tones and ask, ‘Why can’t I get that sound out of my amp?’

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And that brings us to the PlexiRanger. Carl Martin looked back at those great guitar tones and how they were achieved, and thought ‘What if..?’ So the PlexiRanger combines a Plexi-voiced overdrive/distortion featuring controls for Gain, Tone, and Level; and a Rangemaster-inspired boost with controls for Boost, Range, and Frequency. There’s a three-position Lo-Cut switch (the settings are slight low-frequency cut, heavy low cut, or no low cut).

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The Boost knob gives you up to 15dB of clean boost to drive your amp harder, while the Range control governs how much treble boost is applied. Then that circuit can be fed into the PlexiTone side, giving you Rangemaster-into-Plexi tones right there at your feet. And if you decide to turn off the Plexi side, you’re free to apply the boost’s magic to whatever amplifier you wish to pair it with: as we’ve seen from Iommi, May, Blackmore, and Page, treble boosters can be very amp-dependent, and the one pedal can unlock different sonic treasures from different amps. 

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Written by Peter Hodgson from IheartGuitar, Henrik Berger, Nicolai Schneekloth.

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V&R Boutique Guitar Show gallery from The Fellowship Of Acoustics 2019

V&R Boutique Guitar Show gallery from The Fellowship Of Acoustics 2019

In Dec 2019 we went to The Fellowship Of Acoustics with V&R Boutique Guitar Show.

If you choose to share pics please credit VintageandRare.com

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V&R Boutique Guitar Show 2019 at Max Guitar in Holland

V&R Boutique Guitar Show at Max Guitar in Holland

On Nov. 30th & Dec. 1st we brought V&R Boutique Guitar Show to Max Guitar in Holland. 

Here is a gallery from the show. It was a great success with hundreds of people visiting, drooling, and trying out the guitars and gear we brought to the show. Huge thanks to the awesome and cool team at Max Guitar for having us. 

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The Great Scandinavian Guitar Show 2019 Gallery

The Great Scandinavian Guitar Show 2019

Pictures from The Great Scandinavian Guitar Show 2019 at Fryshuset in Stockholm.
It was a fantastic weekend together with friends from the passionate Swedish guitar community.
We also brought our touring Boutique Guitar Show to the show, which was a great success. We gave the public a unique opportunity to experience guitars and gear from luthiers and builders from all over the world.
If you use these pictures online, please make sure to credit VintageandRare.com.

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Akustikken – Denmark – V&R Boutique Guitar Show gallery

Akustikken – Denmark – V&R Boutique Guitar Show gallery

On Oct. 11th, 2019 – Akustikken in Copenhagen, Denmark, hosted the V&R Boutique Guitar Show. 

We had the rainiest day of the month, but a good little crowd was turning up to try out some of the world-class guitars, amps, and pedals that we brought to the show. 

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