Montreal luthiers hand-craft unique guitars at Mile End Co-op

Nic Delisle loves guitars, but the Montrealer says he quickly realized he didn't have the dedication or patience required to be a professional musician.

Nevertheless, he's found a way to impress the pros around the world.

"At some point, it became clear that I was probably obsessed with the object, the musical instrument itself," he explained as he put the finishing touch on an instrument.

Delisle, like most luthiers, started as an apprentice, but he soon found a niche market for musicians looking for something different from the chain-assembly instruments that dominate the market.

Delisle said his priority was moving away from established standards when building his brand, Island Guitars.

"Tradition and history have become the norms, so a Fender [guitar] you have a maple neck, your rosewood fretboard, your swamp-ash body, and that was done that way for the last 70 years and there were economic reasons behind that," he said.

Delisle added he decided to take his guitar designs a step further.

"I like to use as much local and Canadian wood as possible. We have tons of great wood. I use a lot of spruce, a lot of maple, a lot of cedar," he said.

Delisle said some of his projects also include recycled wood from century-old demolished buildings simply because he likes to give a new life to something old and time-tested.

The metal parts are laser-crafted locally to his specifications.

Delisle designs his pick-ups with a British partner, but he works alone in a shared space.

Together, he and a half-dozen music instrument enthusiasts founded the the Mile End Guitar Co-op in a repurposed garment factory.

It's a place where a handful of luthiers build instruments independently from each other while pooling resources together.

Oliver Duval-Quinn also builds guitars under his trademark name Quinn Guitars.

At the shop, he's known as the intricate electronics guy.

"We come from different backgrounds, so we do get different opinions and experiences," said Duval-Quinn. "We get to pull the best from different worlds by doing that."

Michael Kennedy also has a workspace to create specialty steel-string acoustic guitars custom-made for each musician.

"There's stuff like what kind of tone do you want to sound like, so that will affect how I will brace the top," he said. "All the support structure underneath, that gets changed depending on how the customer wants it to sound."

With each piece specially made, it's safe to say you won't find these unique guitars in your average music store.

They're sold through trade magazines and word of mouth in the professional musician circuit, created by a handful of artisans dedicated to a shared passion.