EP12: Can Guitar Amps Be Furniture? Mike Nopper Says Yes.

Jesse Paliotto (00:00)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Guitar Journal podcast where we love talking about making music, particularly through the lens of fingerstyle and jazz guitar. I'm your host, Jesse Pagliato. Love bringing the best of the music world to you here on the Guitar Journal podcast. Today I'm honored to have with us Mike Nopper. Mike is the founder of Sonoforma, a company reimagining guitar gear by blending musical function with refined furniture quality design. He's got a background in pro audio design engineering and leadership in the furniture industry. So Mike brings a really unique.

perspective to this world of guitar that we like to talk about here on this podcast. And if you see his stuff, as we're going to get into here in just a second, you'll see it kind of combines that elegance of 70s, Hi-Fi consoles, and then bridges that gap with rugged gear and sophisticated interior design. So Mike, I'm really honored to have you on the show today. Thanks for doing this, man.

Mike Nopper (00:49)
Thanks for having me, Jesse. I'm happy to be here.

Jesse Paliotto (00:52)
Yeah, right on. It was kind of funny and a full fair warning to those that are regular listeners of the podcast. This podcast always focuses on guitar player interviews and we're doing something a little different today. So Mike is coming to us live from Nicaragua where he's on mission to do some of the work that he does. And we're going to be talking a little bit different around guitar gear. And so I'm really excited about this. But it probably begs the question that we can start off with, Mike, which is, can you just talk a bit about your own background?

I mentioned a few highlights there in that little intro bio, but could you talk a little bit about like where you come from? What you do?

Mike Nopper (01:27)
Yeah, for sure. So I have a background in engineering and I studied that and I've always loved guitar. Since, I mean, since I can remember, I've always really been into music. Family was always very musical. I have an older brother and he got me big into the blues, big into Clapton when I was younger. And so I got my first guitar in grade eight and just took off from there, loved it ever since. And then getting older,

Jesse Paliotto (01:49)
right on.

Mike Nopper (01:57)
I guess I always just really wanted to find that intersection between, you know, something that could be a career for me, but also could really be a passion. And that was the intersection of design and engineering with music. So after school, after graduating, I worked for a pro audio company for a bit, and then went on to do like a consumer product that was also not really pro audio, but more like a little boombox speaker.

Jesse Paliotto (02:27)
Yeah.

Mike Nopper (02:27)
and then

worked in custom fabrication for many, many years after that. We did some audio related projects, but that's where I kind of fell in love with building things and certainly woodworking. We did a lot of work for furniture designers. And so then this started to form. This started to like see the pieces come together. In, I would say, I think 2020, 2019, 2020, I started a small business called Implicit Audio and I was...

doing flat packed CNC cut guitar cabinets. And so we were cutting really just the pieces on a CNC all out of Baltic birch. We'd flat pack them and send them to the customer and they would put it together and decorate it themselves. It was really...

Jesse Paliotto (03:02)
interesting.

And flat packing,

for anybody that may not know the term, in my mind, that's IKEA furniture, right? It's where it's all down to the most minimal footprint cardboard box you can fit it in.

Mike Nopper (03:16)
Yeah, totally.

Yep, yeah, 100%. These were just the pieces. And that was a really awesome project. And we did that for maybe two years, two or three years. It was awesome. We were shipping all across Canada and the States. And it was really cool too, because the customer felt like they were part of the product that they were putting together. They would receive unfinished parts. They put them together. It was a good time.

Jesse Paliotto (03:41)
And this was a guitar cabinet,

so like they would get a speaker, install it, like make the actual, or this is where you're storing your guitars, which way I'm missing.

Mike Nopper (03:48)
Ah,

yeah, this was, this was not like a storage thing, but like a guitar cabinet, like a little one by 12 or a two by 12. They would have to put their own speaker in and we were just selling the components and shipping them out. And so this, you know, again, this was like stepping stones of kind of building out these ideas leading to Sonoforma. And I think there were all these, always these like more high-end furniture designs that were in my head, but implicit audio wasn't really the venue to do it with.

Jesse Paliotto (03:54)
yeah, okay.

Yeah. that's super cool.

Mike Nopper (04:19)
So then when implicit audio closed and we wrapped that up, we decided to push forward some of the ideas that weren't right for that app. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (04:30)
Yeah, because implicit audio,

it's almost like you're kind of going for the constraints of being able to flat pack ship it, be self assembled, probably limits the design that you can do. So you know, all of a sudden you're like, I can't do this crazy idea or this cool idea because I can't flat pack it, right?

Mike Nopper (04:46)
Totally. kind of the point with implicit audio was that the customer got to do their, they got to inject their creativity into it. and the really fun thing too, just from, guess, a business perspective was the user generated content was awesome. Cause they got to do their own finishing and they'd send us photos back and be like, dude, this was awesome. Like, this is how I did mine. You're like, I never would have thought to do it in that way. That looks awesome. Super happy. And then we'd get to share the photos and it became this like fun feedback.

Jesse Paliotto (04:52)
Mm-hmm.

yeah.

Yeah, for the music world, there's so much of that. I've built my own guitar from one of those kits. I'm blanking out on where I got the kit from. It turned out terrible. I'm not a good luthier. I know I see all these ads right now. think it's Stuart McDonald or one of these companies is doing a build your own guitar pedal course. And there's just so much fun about feeling like you're in control of your tone. It's not that I'm just buying gear. This is unique to me. I'm making something. That's super fun.

Mike Nopper (05:23)
Hahaha!

yeah.

Totally.

Jesse Paliotto (05:41)
I want to indulge myself a little bit and ask a question that I don't know if guitar players all over the world would necessarily be interested in, but I'm curious about the woodworking aspect. I think for a lot of our listeners, like it would make sense, like kind of like getting started with guitar, older brother kind of gets you into it, doing different things. But what got you into the woodworking side of it? How did you step into that?

Mike Nopper (06:01)
That was a job that I had. I worked for a digital fabrication company for about six years. And so we were a CNC fab shop. And so people would bring in their ideas. We would fabricate them with CNCs, like an automated router that is going around cutting. And we were doing a lot of work with furniture designers. So I got to see these independent designers bring in chairs and credenzas and tables.

and we would help them fabricate these complex parts that they would go back, bring to their shop, finish the piece. And so I kind of got to, I got to like dip my toe into that high-end furniture world and see that. And I built tons of projects there. I used to go to the shop on the weekends and just, yeah, build custom cabinets. Did that for a long time. Custom guitar cabinets is what I mean.

Jesse Paliotto (06:50)
That's super cool.

That's such a great opportunity to see so many different designs come through rather than, you know, making the same coffee table for six years straight, like just seeing the stream of custom projects come through. That's got to be an amazing, like, kind of experience education type of situation.

Mike Nopper (07:06)
It was super cool experience. It was this yeah, again, it was this awesome mix of like seeing all these small business owners come in with their idea, we would help them bring it together, I would get to ask them questions just about what being a small business owner is like, and then also ask them questions about how they design the furniture, how they chose the piece of wood that they decided to use, the problems they ran into and just a lot was very cool experience.

Jesse Paliotto (07:31)
Yeah that's awesome. So let me let me kind of go to step two then so that implicit audio wasn't where to do this but sona forma is. And so can you talk about what sona forma is what this company makes what kind of the vision is.

Mike Nopper (07:38)
Mm-hmm.

The root of Sona Forma really is trying to blend high-end furniture aesthetics with guitar gear, music equipment in general. the idea behind it is that so many products that are out there right now, the aesthetic of them, I feel like, is derived from the idea that they're going to be taken out on the road and thrown into the back of a van and go on tour, right? That is kind of like that.

Jesse Paliotto (08:10)
Yeah, true.

Mike Nopper (08:13)
You know, you're seeing cabinets built out of, you know, the wrapped in Tolex and they got like metal corners. And it's like, what are you doing in your living room that you need metal corners? You're not swinging that thing around. That's not happening. And so I feel that.

Jesse Paliotto (08:17)
Yeah. Yeah.

Your toddler's going to

knock their teeth out on it when they trip and fall.

Mike Nopper (08:28)
100 % right and it's just like the the aesthetic just doesn't match where most of those products are being used. You know, for the people that are touring they need that that that totally makes sense, but the people that are playing in their living room and you know want something that kind of blends in with the aesthetic of their living room and looks like a design piece looks like an intentional centerpiece that's where we're trying to live.

Jesse Paliotto (08:53)
I love that idea. It reminds me of, I think the term if I'm saying it right is skeuomorphism, which is like, somebody can fact check me. I'll drop a note, a Wikipedia link in the show notes, but the idea of where you continue to use some sort of design element because it's a trigger for your brain, not because it's an actual functional part. So it would be like, you know, when we use a floppy disk as the symbol for saving a file on the computer, like,

Mike Nopper (08:59)
is schomorphism.

You

Jesse Paliotto (09:21)
Nobody's seen a floppy disk in 40 years, but we still think of that. so like nobody's, you know, most guitar players are not throwing their gear into the back of a tour bus, but we're still designing all of the gear with these metal corners as if they are like, it's almost like it's a visual. I don't know what it is. It's a signal more than it's functional.

Mike Nopper (09:24)
Yeah.

Yeah, like a re-trigger. No, I

absolutely know what you mean. It's the classic, like, why do you do it that way? Well, that's the way we've always done it. It's like, well, what if? And so we really tried to start from, yeah, from the beginning. Also, I mean, huge inspiration. I have always loved Leslie cabinets and like the rotary Leslie cabinets and the 70s record players. Those two pieces of, they're furniture, really. They're furniture, but they're functional furniture. And so frequently they are like,

Jesse Paliotto (09:45)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike Nopper (10:07)
centerpiece items that sit in your living room and you know they're a big part of someone's living room. They take up space intentionally.

Jesse Paliotto (10:16)
Yeah, and you know, I wonder, I'd be really curious about this because Leslie cabinets and organs, I've always seen them associated with organs. I guess you could probably use them connected to some other instruments. Were used a lot in churches. And so they were physically front and center in this room where, you know, it is designed not to be rough and tumble. It's supposed to be, you know, sophisticated or something.

Mike Nopper (10:29)
Yeah.

It's

a permanent fixture and sophisticated for sure. The molding, you don't put decorative molding on a cabinet unless you intend to. That is an extra cost. That is intentionally aesthetic. It's great.

Jesse Paliotto (10:41)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's interesting. So what triggered your idea? How did you get into this? Was there just an aha moment or how did you get to the point where you're like, we need to do this?

Mike Nopper (11:00)
I mean, it just it snowballed right it was always really loving these I have I have drawn up designs for Leslie cabinets and like decorative, you know credenza cabinets, I don't know. So for years really really for years, and I thought for a moment implicit audio was the way to do it, but it wasn't. then so in a form of became that and I was like this, I have to get this idea out of my head, I absolutely have to get this idea out of my head and the designs that we landed on. That's.

Jesse Paliotto (11:23)
Yeah.

Mike Nopper (11:30)
that's generation four. So we've gone through four different aesthetic generations. None of the prior ones were produced, but they were brought to like, not quite engineering drones, but you know, like late concept and then scrap start again, scrap start again. So we landed on four and yeah, and that's something that we're really happy with.

Jesse Paliotto (11:47)
Yeah. Who do you like? What's the main use of the product or the main audience? Like, do you have a picture of like the typical way some the typical person or the typical way a person would use this is going to be that like who is that target audience?

Mike Nopper (12:00)
Yeah. Target audience is someone that is mostly playing at home. Uh, someone that, you know, wants to have their gear set up in the living room, someone that wants to have it very easily accessible. So what we're trying to do is provide some, uh, some storage and like easy access, uh, function to it. And of course, you know, aesthetics is big part. It's something that like should feel at home in your, in your living space. It's not something that you're going to tuck away in your closet. it, you know, it's, it's, it's got to take up some space. It's got to be this like presence.

Yeah, people who are playing at home.

Jesse Paliotto (12:34)
The video version of podcast, I'll drop some images over this so as people are watching, if you're on audio right now, it'd be worth clicking the show notes and grabbing the link to Sonoforma and going to their website so you can see just how awesome these guitar cabinets, these furniture pieces look, because they really do. The other thought that's on my mind is the, I don't know if you've seen any of this, Mike, but the Guitar Center CEO has come out recently and said that they're gonna basically revamp.

kind of guitar center stores to, and I caught his quotes correctly. It's basically like they've really over indexed towards low price gear for the beginner market. And they're trying to index back towards high end gear for dedicated musicians. And I've seen this a little bit in the marketplace. Like I think there was such a push over the last 10 years where so many companies realized there's way more beginners in music than there is serious musicians.

And so we're just going to make a whole bunch of $200 acoustics and throw them up on amazon.com and make a bunch of free cash. Whereas, you know, the shift back, like I'm optimistic that what you're doing with something that's high quality resonates with that shift towards like, no, there's real musicians who want really good gear because they're committed to doing this as part of how they live their life. that's super cool.

Mike Nopper (13:53)
Yeah, I appreciate that. I wasn't aware of the guitar center swing in that direction, but I'm glad to hear that. I'm very glad to hear that. That definitely aligns with what we're doing. it's like, I think...

Jesse Paliotto (13:57)
Yeah. Yeah. I know.

Mike Nopper (14:07)
I think that from my experience in the furniture world, I started to see that there are a lot of people out there that really value the craftsmanship behind things that will happily pay for that experience, for that high-end experience, for that high-end product, craftsmanship, and function and form. That is an important thing, too. It's a smaller subset of people, certainly. But they're out there, and they need to be served, too.

Jesse Paliotto (14:15)
Mm-hmm.

We're speaking of design and like kind of paying for quality. Can you talk a little bit about the design aesthetic and materials and stuff? I know I mentioned in the intro the 70s Hi-Fi console. I don't know if everybody will kind of have that mental reference. Maybe you could talk a little bit like what is the what's the vibe on these?

Mike Nopper (14:48)
Yeah,

the definitely definitely a lot of old ideas rehashed put it that way from like 70s, 70s, hi fi consoles. The you know, they're big, they're usually darker aesthetic would the wood that we're using is teak. So we're using teak hardwood is a real nice dense wood, and is actually quite reminiscent reminiscent of lot of that 60s 70s furniture. These pieces are they'd have a bit of a mid century modern aesthetic, though I don't think

we would want to necessarily like peg ourselves completely in that aesthetic. I think there's room to grow for us. But definitely those vibes in the background. The wood is all FSC certified teak, solid hardwood teak, the whole thing. This thing weighs a ton. You wouldn't want to move it around, not bring it to any gigs. So yeah, it's a really, really nice piece.

Jesse Paliotto (15:39)
Yeah.

I'm like slipping into so many threads of questions I wanted to ask. I'll just ask a handful of them really quickly. When you ship them, they come fully assembled?

Mike Nopper (15:47)
Sure.

Yeah, there is no, this is like white glove service. This comes right to your door. It is, it's fully assembled. There's nothing that you need to do.

Jesse Paliotto (15:59)
Oh,

that's super cool. And then how do they sound? Like I'm thinking like as you're talking about the wood, you know, that's often in people's mind. I know we're talking about cabinets and not the actual guitar here still. But can you talk for a second about like, what's the speaker in there? What's the what? Like, how does it sound like this is what everybody's going to care about? Yeah.

Mike Nopper (16:03)
Listen.

100%. And we're going

to be posting some videos very soon, just with that kind of stuff. So people can go and listen to themselves as well. It sounds awesome. And that was a huge, obviously, huge focus of us. This thing needs to sound great. Yeah, sure, it can look good. But if it doesn't sound good, that's no fun. So this was a huge design focus for us, especially because we have things like door hinges and drawer slides, which are not usually present on a guitar cabinet. So thank you, potentially. But thankfully, no.

Jesse Paliotto (16:20)
cool.

Yeah, so you get like rattling and stuff, potentially.

Mike Nopper (16:45)
We put a lot of time and effort into this. This thing is so solidly built with like traditional like handcrafted furniture techniques. It's all mortise and tenon. And so it's a really solid base. So thankfully there are there are no negative audible vibrations in all of these this hardware this and this. So it sounds great. And what we've done is you'll see that the the depth of the cabinet. I can't remember the number off the top of my head, but it's like

It's like 18 inches deep or something. And a usual guitar cabinet is around 10 or 11. So we created a false back within the cabinet. So there's this like hidden chamber that is actually the guitar cabinet. And really we based it around a fender hot rod, like one by 12 cabinets. So it's about the volume of that. And this is just kind of from what I had learned building cabinets before. The speaker that it will come with is, the one that we've listed on the site is a vintage 30.

12 inch vintage 30, but we'll put whatever speaker you want in it. We're gonna try and, we're gonna really reduce the amount of custom variations that are available in terms of design, but we will put any speaker you want. That's an easy change. But coming from the world of custom, it's great, it's fun, but it is exhausting and it can be really expensive as well. So this time we wanted to come up with like a defined product. We have three different finishes that you can have.

that can choose from, and then you can pick whatever speaker you want.

Jesse Paliotto (18:16)
And so the cabinet itself, I mean, just for those who may not have had a chance to hit the link or be seeing us on YouTube right now, it's it almost looks like a like a console piece that goes on the side of your living room. It's got a countertop that's maybe like kind of tabletop high. There's the cabinet for the speaker off. I'm thinking of the main piece. I'm forgetting the name of it, but it's got the speaker off to the side. And then there's a section that's like a little storage area with sliding drawers or I think they open up doors to or

Mike Nopper (18:44)
Open up.

Jesse Paliotto (18:45)
not drawers, but doors to store stuff. And then the thing that's interesting to me also is that there's a very long low drawer at the bottom that pulls out that you can just lay your guitar in. Did I capture that right?

Mike Nopper (18:58)
That's perfect.

That's exactly it. That's exactly it. The the drawer was a later idea that was introduced. So originally this started with, yeah, without the drawer. And then we added it on after and I just thought it was a cool way to do it. Not a lot of people are doing the drawer thing and it is a very, it turns out to be a very contentious detail. There are some people that are like, yeah, totally. There's a lot of people are like, I would never put my guitar in a drawer. I want to look at it. It needs to be on the wall.

Jesse Paliotto (19:20)
Really?

Mike Nopper (19:26)
It's like, that's actually a totally fair point. I respect that. But I think the drawer's kind of cool. Yeah. You could totally put other stuff. But yeah, the door, I just wanted to say. It has, I think it will fit an acoustic. We set it up as, it's got five inches of clearance. So I'm looking over at my acoustic. I think it would probably fit.

Jesse Paliotto (19:28)
Yeah.

You have to tell them, like, you don't have to put it in the drawer. could keep other stuff there. It's all right.

I, does the drawer fit an acoustic?

Okay. Yeah, maybe.

Well,

and I'm kind of backing into actually probably my real question, which is this is very oriented towards electric guitar, I think, right? And so in my mind, I'm thinking like, I play less electric, I play mostly acoustic and then some arch top. And so it sounds like this would probably be the best fit for me for the arch top where I could, you know, get, okay, now I'm backing into the second question I should have asked, which is you need to bring your own amp head. Is that right? Okay.

Mike Nopper (20:11)
Mm-hmm.

You gotta bring your own amp head.

This was a huge part of the design decision as well. It was tricky, right? Because guitarists are, they like their sound. They have a specific sound often. And I struggled for a long time whether or not to put an amplifier in it. And I have a design and we're building one. This is for somebody else. This is a custom project, but we are...

We had a design where the amp was put in, but I thought immediately, you know, someone's going to come out and say, well, I don't like the sound offender. I need a Marshall in there. It's like, well, I've just cut my entire market in half completely. And I would never be able to please everybody. You could go that the, who was it? Is it the Ford who made the model T? was like, you can have any color you want as long as it's black. We could have chosen to do that, I guess, but we opted for at least in this first version.

Jesse Paliotto (21:01)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. This one's just black. Yeah.

Mike Nopper (21:24)
to have it be a passive cabinet, you can put your app bed on top and then we appeal to a wider range, wider audience.

Jesse Paliotto (21:33)
I mean, I personally like that because I like the flexibility even within as a I can see as a guitar player I might have seasons where I'm going to put a quilter on top and do more jazzy type stuff and then I'm like, you know, I've been playing more blues. I'm to get some sort of orange or some sort of like more kind of edgier thing that I want to run through and so you can change that out then. It does mean it's probably less suited for acoustic guitar right now or maybe is there any vision for acoustic amplification?

Mike Nopper (21:43)
Mm-hmm.

I mean, we we'd focused on electric at the moment, but we'd look we have some ideas in the future, and we'd be happy to incorporate some acoustic flares 100 % we probably have to increase the height of the drawer a little bit. And I guess, beyond that the choice of speaker you'd want more like more of full range speaker that would go in there.

Jesse Paliotto (22:21)
Yeah,

yeah, because you're going more for transparency in an acoustic amplification situation. And so almost like, you know, at that point, you almost might be able to get away with the, you know, Ford, you know, you can have any type of acoustic set up as long as it's all black. It's going to be the one pre-app we give you and the one driving station and then the one speaker, because it is a lot more, think about transparency and then, you know, especially a lot of actually kind of this podcast and the audience that, you know, is here and the

interviews we do, a lot of folks are using quite a bit of effects and stuff. So there is still all of that going on. It's just being able to channel it through some sort of speaker that we can get a little volume out of.

Mike Nopper (23:02)
Nice. Yeah, yeah.

We have a lot of ideas we'd like to get to. This was the first one that we got out. And then we are prototyping a smaller version, which is kind of like a side table. We're going to call it the Rhapsody. And then we're prototyping a pedal board at the moment, too. So those are in the system. Should be pushed through soon.

Jesse Paliotto (23:10)
Mm-hmm.

That's cool.

I just, if I didn't say it already, I'm gonna say now, I love this idea. It's so cool. I feel like I ended up in this spot and I think a lot of folks did during COVID where you were playing from home. And so it feels, I don't mean to be, this is gonna come off maybe a mean, I don't mean it to, but it can kind of like feel junky to like have all your guitar gear out in the living room. Like with all these cables and plugs and.

stuff and if you've got kids or a family or anything and they're running around and the idea of like making it look nice and have it contained but I can still you know get out my guitar and play for a little bit I just love love love this man I'm super pumped for this.

Mike Nopper (23:59)
I appreciate it. That was a big focus for us because I mean we all went through that as well. We're stuck at home and yeah, mean, know, cables, all this, it can get messy and then you got to put it away and then once it goes away, it's harder to, you know, out of sight, out of mind. You might not practice much. You might not play it quite as much.

Jesse Paliotto (24:16)
Yeah, that's a great point. I hadn't processed that, but that's, I think, real common, like if you read Atomic Habits by James Clear or any of these books that really focus on like how do you build new habits, removing friction is a huge part of it. And that's always the case with musicians. Like if I gotta go get everything out, set it all up, go to a special place, then you're gonna do it less often. That's just reality. So that's an interesting like sort of non-technical feature of this gear is.

Mike Nopper (24:29)
percent.

That's just reality.

Jesse Paliotto (24:43)
You want to practice more? Make sure it's always right in front of you. You will do it more.

Mike Nopper (24:47)
Yeah, that's exactly it.

Jesse Paliotto (24:49)
Can you talk a little bit about the design to production? I'd really be interested just to hear a little bit of that story, maybe a lot of that story, because this has been a journey. know, Mike and I started emailing Mila last year when you were first kind of getting into, I think, trying to get prototypes kicked off, if I remember. But maybe you could just kind of give a little bit of the journey. Like, how did this go from actual like it's in my head to I have a physical product ready to ship?

Mike Nopper (25:14)
Yeah, for sure. It's a fun one. know, well, I mean, as I said, a lot of these ideas have been bouncing around. And so the first step for me was to kind of get them all out, get them all out as quickly as possible. And in part in doing that, what I did was I reached out to a lot of, actually a lot of old customers from Implicit Audio that I'm still friends with today. They bought cabinets years ago. And so I trust their opinion and we had always had good conversations. So I reached out and we kind of

bounced some of these ideas around and then it was basically just down to the drawing board and it was like months of 3D CAD models and sketching and just trying to figure out what the form looked like and you know digging up old designs that I had done trying to figure out what functions needed to happen. As I said the whole like integrated amplifier versus passive cabinet idea was a huge part of that trying to figure that out because obviously do you leave space for it? Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (26:10)
Yeah, that's a big like split in the design

direction, right? Yeah.

Mike Nopper (26:14)
a huge

split. then so then I had to choose one. And then, you know, the form started to follow that that function. Once I landed on something that I really liked, started doing renders and started sharing them online, just to see if people are interested. And there was there was some great feedback, again, product feedback, but also just like kind of reinforced that there is a bit of an interest in this. We moved on to just on Instagram.

Jesse Paliotto (26:38)
Yeah. Where were you sharing it online? out curiosity. Was it like,

interesting. Okay.

Mike Nopper (26:45)
Yeah,

yeah, Instagram did a Reddit post as well. We can talk about I did a recent Reddit post just last week that that we're very, proud of when we talk about that later. But yeah, just like initial, you know, not really as a brand, but just sharing these ideas and seeing what people say, and trying to get some honest feedback. And then, you know, we incorporated as much as we could. And

Jesse Paliotto (26:54)
Alright.

Mike Nopper (27:12)
moved on to engineering drawings and so been working with the factory here in Nicaragua and doing so I did all the production drawings, but obviously needed to. needed to make sure that they were in line with the way that they were going to produce them so they're they want them in a certain format they need them. You know they work in millimeters not inches just these kinds of things so making sure that.

Jesse Paliotto (27:31)
Yep. So do you produce

those or do you give them to the person, the factory that's going to actually cut stuff and they kind of make them and give them back for verification? How do you do that?

Mike Nopper (27:42)
that would be the normal. I make them. I make all the production drawings. I'm confident I've done that for years and I'm confident doing that. I know, I know the machines that they have and realistically the way that they're going to be doing it. But they might want things tweaked a little bit. You know, they have standard dimensions of wood. And so working within that so that I don't go outside and need them to cut a small piece from a really big piece of wood and be wasteful. Try to be mindful of that kind of thing. So I did all the production drawings all

Jesse Paliotto (27:46)
Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Nopper (28:12)
I don't know, 52 pages of that set, whatever it was, and we send them to the factory, they review. Once all of that is good and everybody agrees what it is, then we put it into production.

Jesse Paliotto (28:24)
With them agreeing, I'm guessing there's a prototype stage in there. they, like they go, we're actually gonna try and make one and see if this works.

Mike Nopper (28:31)
Totally. And that's what follows. the engineering drawings, we move on to prototyping. So it was really fun to be able to, you know, I was down there during a lot of this process down here, is where I am now, but down at the factory for a lot of the process, speaking with the designers and the production team and even the carpenters, it was a lot of fun. So being able to see like literally from the beginning of the operation, the log that came in, they're slicing it up, you know, not just for my furniture, but like for other furniture that they're producing, but it's...

You know, can see the log coming down through the process. You can see them selecting the pieces so that the colors of the wood match when you're making, when you're laying up a big board from multiple boards. You want the colors to be relatively even. You want to make sure you have more heartwood and sapwood, which lends to color and stability. It was really cool. It's really cool to see the whole process.

Jesse Paliotto (29:21)
So did you get, were there any blips where like they made a prototype and then I'm guessing you would actually put a speaker in it and actually try and play through it and you were like, dude, this is all wrong. Like, did you have to go back and like kind of go through some cycles of edits or something?

Mike Nopper (29:32)
Hahaha

There were some revisions, 100%. Thankfully, the way that we designed the guitar cabinet, it sounded good. And we had pulled from a lot of these earlier designs that I had worked with. And the actual guitar cabinet section of this piece, like I said, is this like, it's an internal chamber and it is part of the shell of the thing. So it's super stable. And yeah, we put a speaker in and we played through it to make sure it sounded good. There's no rattling like we talked about.

But yeah, there were some revisions. have this curved, like the legs are kind of part of the outer shell and they come in at an angle like this. And so the door is also angled. And so to have an angled door swinging was a bit of a challenge. We had some points that were kind of touching. So we had to move some dimensions around to make that work. Yeah, little bits here and there.

Jesse Paliotto (30:29)
Yeah, I gotta say that

is a pretty badass life story. You're like, so there I was in Nicaragua with my electric guitar rocking the crap out of this furniture factory to test out my new design. That is so cool, man. That's a great story.

Mike Nopper (30:46)
It

was a ton of fun. And although, you know, everybody there, all the carpenters, they had never produced that kind of furniture before. So they were all, everybody's like hanging around watching. And yeah, it was fun to finally turn it on and like, this thing going to work? Is this going to make any noise at all? And yeah, it sounded good.

Jesse Paliotto (30:52)
I'm sure.

Yeah.

And you're like, am I doing a concert now? Is that what's happening right now? A little mini, mini furniture factory concert. Hey, you know, that's how it goes. You know, we, kind of touched on features, I think mainly, but maybe it's worth asking, is there any other kind of main features of this? We talked about, it's got the cabinet, it's got the internal kind of, I can't remember what you call it, false wall to create that, you know, 12 inch depth on the cabinet. It's got the,

Mike Nopper (31:04)
I guess so.

Yeah, yeah, it's good.

Jesse Paliotto (31:28)
place where can store gear. It's got the shelf for the guitar to actually, or not the shelf, the drawer for the guitar to lay in underneath. Any other main features that are worth commenting on or is that kind of the main gist?

Mike Nopper (31:37)
That's kind of the main stuff. The storage cabinet on the side is it has an adjustable shelf in there that you can move up and down so you can put an amp head, can put whatever you need to in there. Yeah, the guitar, the drawer below is all soft close bloom hardware drawer slides. So it's really nice like pull out and push and feel. There's just a quarter inch jack on the back. So when you put your amp head on top, little quarter inch jack plugs in and it goes right to the speaker.

Jesse Paliotto (31:43)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mike Nopper (32:05)
And then we have the speaker grill, the gray fabric that you see that's just clip-on magnet. And so you have access to the speaker behind it.

Jesse Paliotto (32:07)
yeah.

that's cool. Yeah, so theoretically if somebody was really going to nerd out, they could change out a speaker cabinet themselves if they wanted to.

Mike Nopper (32:22)
Yeah, totally. Yeah, you can put whatever speaker you want in. It's front loaded, so you have access to it. You just got to take the back panel off, which is just screwed on. And yeah, you can do that. Maybe a little bit of work, but you'd make it work. Just screwdriver, all you need.

Jesse Paliotto (32:31)
Yeah. So it be a little bit of work, but theoretically.

But that makes sense that you guys are doing the pedal board. Because then theoretically my use case would be whatever it's, I'm going to go play guitar, it's 9 o'clock at night, I'm going to play for half an hour. So I'm going to open the... Yeah, I keep tripping up between the word door and drawer. Open the doors in front of the speaker. I'm going to open the doors to the storage and pull out maybe my pedal board. Put that on the ground. Open the drawer, grab my guitar.

Mike Nopper (32:51)
the cupboard or the...

Jesse Paliotto (33:06)
plug into the pedal board, plug the pedal board into the top of the cabinet, and I'm off and running. I'm in business.

Mike Nopper (33:12)
And you're good to go.

Yeah, super easy. And so the second unit that we're coming out with, the first one's called the Serenade. This is the big one with the drawer and the cabinet doors that we're talking about. This one's available now. But the next one that we're producing, the Rhapsody, is like a little, it's a one by 10, 10 inch speaker, and it's like a little side table unit. So it's a lot smaller. It does have a drawer though, below it. And the pedal board that we're making is going to be made to fit into that drawer. So we're trying to...

We're trying to be conscious of having them be a bit of a family. They can work together. They are derivatives of each other.

Jesse Paliotto (33:45)
Yeah.

I like that smaller format. think like personally, I can see that where if I'm doing, cause I do have, it's funny, you know, with people getting up in arms around that, you know, drawer at the bottom, like I do hang a guitar on the wall in my, in my living room. And part of it is that friction thing. If I have a guitar out, I'll pull it off the wall and play for 15 minutes more frequently. So the idea of having like a smaller form speaker with maybe a little quilter on top.

Mike Nopper (34:00)
The drawer thing.

Jesse Paliotto (34:14)
that I can just pull that down, plug it in, and actually play through with real tone. I kind of love that. That appeals to me.

Mike Nopper (34:22)
Yeah, I think the Rhapsody will be well received as well. Serenade is big and I think it's gonna be great for the people that have that space and that like really want all those, you be able to store their guitar or whatever. But I think the Rhapsody is gonna be, that's gonna be a fun one. So, yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (34:29)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

So what we to do next is you get the record player on top. So then you're blasting your records and playing along with them. And now, now it's full Nirvana. I didn't mean that in the band sense, but could also just be literally Nirvana. Very cool. The I'm just glancing over. you had mentioned the Reddit thing. What was the other Reddit thread that you said last week?

Mike Nopper (34:43)
100 100 %?

You

So we posted, okay, I posted something like seven months ago, probably close to when I reached out to you and we started talking. And we posted a thing, and it gained a bit of traction on Reddit. And it was kinda cool, and this is where we got a lot of our user feedback. And then I guess last week, last Friday or something, I posted again, and okay, so the title of the first post was, guitar amps be furniture?

discuss, right? And so the...

Jesse Paliotto (35:29)
Yep, yep, I like that.

Very, very triggering. I'm sure there was a whole lot of responses.

Mike Nopper (35:34)
Oh yeah, oh yeah, good and bad, but it was, it was, was fun. Um, it's a good discussion. And then this post, it was, um, can guitar amps be furniture? And then in brackets seven months later, yes, it can. And man, it took off. It absolutely went off the rails. And so I wrote these stats down. We're very proud of these. got in a course of, I guess it was probably about three days, just furiously responding to comments.

Jesse Paliotto (35:48)
Haha.

Mike Nopper (36:03)
We got 1.1 million views. We got 9.1 thousand upvotes, 814 comments, 3.4 thousand shares. And we were cross-posted to the subreddit guitar circle jerk, which is where you just make fun of guitar gear, which I feel like is a rite of passage. And I, that's how I'm looking at it. But yeah, we were very excited about some of those.

Jesse Paliotto (36:05)
Whoa!

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

That's incredible, man. Congratulations. That is a huge, mean, it's gotta feel great as a business owner too. Like I immediately know there is an audience that resonates. Some of them may resonate at a negative frequency, but there is a large portion of those that are probably super into it.

Mike Nopper (36:40)
Totally.

Yeah, yeah, well, you you get the occasional negative comment or like, I don't know that there were a lot of like directly negative ones, but there were a lot of people who just like, you know, the contentious, like I said, the drawer, not having to want the guitar visible or not visible. But yeah, it was super overwhelmingly positive. And it was really exciting. Super exciting.

Jesse Paliotto (37:04)
That's cool.

Send me the links through email. I'd love to put those. I mean, I want to see them anyway, but I'll throw those in the show notes for anybody that wants to check out the discussions over there. Cause I'm sure there was a lot of interesting commentary going on.

Mike Nopper (37:17)
yeah, yeah, there's some good stuff.

Jesse Paliotto (37:19)
But that's

super cool, man. What was it, 1.1 million views? Yeah.

Mike Nopper (37:22)
1.1 million views. Yeah. Yeah, it took off.

And just spent like, yeah, like a solid eight hours straight just replying to comments. And then you know, the comments kind of petered out after that. But we like, yeah, it was fun. It really fun.

Jesse Paliotto (37:31)
Yeah.

You know

what? It is like an underserved market. There was I would say in all of the you know, with the guitar journal, which has been a blog in the past and kind of recently reincarnated it as a podcast now.

but it might've been a couple years ago, there was an Instagram post I put up. It was a repost and I'd gotten permission from the guys who had done it. And it was a, it's almost like a wardrobe cabinet and they had remade it with, know, guitars were stored sort of vertically. And then the drawers inside of the wardrobe at the bottom had been repurposed for like pedals. There wasn't an app involved. It was the most popular thing I ever posted on social media. I'm like, of all this stuff, like, but I feel like there's,

Mike Nopper (38:02)
Mm-hmm.

Cool.

Jesse Paliotto (38:16)
There's just that huge appetite for like so many people. This is where I play is in my house. Like make this smarter, make it look good. So yeah, there's a there's an appetite out there for that's awesome.

Mike Nopper (38:28)
There's a hungry market and I think it is, you know, it's a challenging product to get out there. And I think that not a lot of people either, you know, have access to a furniture factory or like know how to find a furniture factory, know how to build the furniture. It's there's, I feel like there's a fairly large barrier to entry in shipping and creating and prototyping such a big product. The want is there, but there's not a lot of people that are doing it. And so, yeah, I think it's a hungry, hungry audience.

Jesse Paliotto (38:57)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that strikes me just like your unique CV or resume, you know, is really critical because, you know, people that make music and in my experience often are just maker type people. like to make things, they're creative, they can see something in their head and then bring it into reality. But there is a lot of industry specific knowledge that is kind of coming together in Sonoforma.

to really make something that's high quality, looks good and functional and everything. So yeah, I would agree that barrier to entry is high despite people trying to do stuff on their own, like it's hard.

Mike Nopper (39:34)
Yeah, and it's that Venn diagram that, you know, after looking back on it now, it's like, that is exactly where I want to live. Those are all the things that I like, and I've found where that intersection is. And it was really funny, just in this journey, I'm starting to meet some really, really interesting people. And, know, through Instagram, I don't know, this was a couple months ago, started chatting with this guy, I think his handle is signal path, signal path on Instagram.

Jesse Paliotto (39:45)
Yeah.

Mike Nopper (40:02)
And super nice. started chatting and he just had, you know, chatting about what's on a form on the product and the work that he's doing. And then at one point he goes, and by the way, if you ever like need any help in like marketing or anything like this, happy to do it. He's like, in my full-time job, I am a marketer for a furniture company. I'm like, man, this is awesome. Unexpected, but it's just, again, like this interesting crossover of like music and furniture. And it's just, it's funny.

Jesse Paliotto (40:22)
You're like, what? was...

Yeah.

That is, I was just reading this article the other day about trends over the next three to five years and sort of the marketplace and stuff. And one of them is niche, like really more and more sub niches or however you pronounce niches, however you pronounce that word. And so there is evidently this like very sub niche of musical gear, furniture, a guitar like that is emerging. So, or maybe always was there. It's just finally getting some love from some companies.

Mike Nopper (41:02)
could be.

Jesse Paliotto (41:04)
So if people want to order one the big important question what do they do? Are they are available now?

Mike Nopper (41:07)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, they're available now. The website is live. You can go to soniforma.co. It's available. It's there. You can pick the color that you want. Like I said before, it comes with a Celestion Vintage 30, but if you want something different in it, send me an email. Happy to do that. Happy to order the speaker and put it in. Yeah, they're handmade. They are made to order.

the moment, though we may eventually hold a very small amount of inventory, but we'll see where that goes. And what you see on the website is its prices included, sorry, the price includes the tax and it's $200 flat shipping through the US.

Jesse Paliotto (41:53)
How long is the lead time right now?

Mike Nopper (41:55)
What we're saying is it's handmade to order and it ships in 8 to 12 weeks.

Jesse Paliotto (42:00)
Got it, okay. So go to the site, pick it out. If people wanna follow kind of updates on as you maybe come up with new things or maybe when like pedal boards released or the smaller format, what's the best way to do that?

Mike Nopper (42:13)
Yeah, you can follow us on Instagram at sona.forma. You can also go to the website, you can sign up for our newsletter. And in that we're sharing our prototype journey. We post updates there. We don't send out very many emails, but when we do have something new to share, we'll send it out and you can follow along that way.

Jesse Paliotto (42:34)
right on, I will be doing that. This is so exciting, man. I'm really happy for you. Anything we didn't get to touch on that you wanted to make sure that we talked through it all?

Mike Nopper (42:42)
I think that was the most of it. Yeah, we covered design, we covered influences, and yeah, it was really good conversation.

Jesse Paliotto (42:49)
Yeah, awesome. Well, so glad to have you here. Thank you, Mike, for doing this. Thanks everybody for being a part of a little bit of a different podcast episode today, but hopefully you're excited as well as some of the stuff that Mike and some of former are coming out with. So thanks everybody for joining us. I'm your host, Jesse Pagliato. I love being able to do what we did today, which is just talk about making music, making cool stuff, and doing that here on the Guitar Journal podcast. Have a great week, everybody. We'll catch you next time.

Mike Nopper (42:55)
Thank you.

Thanks, Jesse.