About Voyage-Air
At Voyage Air Guitar we believe that every guitar player should be able to take their instrument anywhere – wherever there’s musical needs or inspiration. Bicycling. Hiking. Airline travel. An afternoon at the park. Alone on the beach, composing music to the sound of the wind and the waves. Or the simple joy of a sing-along, with good friends around a campfire.
We also believe that traveling with a guitar shouldn’t be an obstacle, or require a musician to downgrade their instrument to a miniature size or shape. All Voyage-Air guitars are full-size, performance-level instruments that fold in half for easy portability. Voyage-Air – the future is unfolding.
Voyage-Air Guitar started as a cool idea, in a small guitar shop in northern California. Over the past five years, we have carefully engineered and developed the details of the ‘folding guitar.’ We have established a variety of patents for our acoustic and electric guitar designs. We have grown to a fully functioning manufacturing and distribution company, with over 200 active dealers in the US, Asia, Australia and Europe.
Everyone who works at Voyage-Air Guitar plays or loves the guitar. We all have a fascination with the world of music, and enjoy the new relationships that we develop on a daily basis. Our jobs bring us closer together with new artists, other guitar builders and an incredible array of industry colleagues. Every day, we’re reminded why we love this business. It’s a passion that’s built into every Voyage-Air guitar.
Since 1972, Harvey Leach has been making guitars – building a total of 350 guitars, mostly flattops with about 20 archtops and electrics. He has been living in California since 1984, when he moved from his native Vermont.
Exactitude is one of Harvey’s main components in his stringed creations. He is also one of the best inlay artists in the world, commissioned by The Martin Guitar Company to adorn Custom Shop creations that sell for $100,000. He has also done inlay work for Paul Reed Smith, Collings, D’Angelico, Godin, Warrior, Warr, Jim Olson, Kevin Ryan, Lance McCollum, and others.
With over 35 years experience in building guitars, Harvey has designed and built guitars with hundreds of combinations of woods, using his innovative design and bracing variations. This gives him keen insight into the subtle design details that contribute to the tone of a guitar. Because all Leach guitars are hand-made from solid tonewoods, personally selected by Harvey, they are also pricey investments – with prices starting at $8,000.
Harvey used this experience to design two different models for Voyage-Air Guitar: a comfortable and fingerstyle-friendly OM-style guitar, and a traditional Dreadnought-size guitar. The size and shape of these instruments are familiar to any guitar player. But it’s Harvey’s advanced designs, and the subtle combination of internal and structural differences that sets Voyage-Air guitars apart.
“I consider myself to be a traditional luthier who is always searching for a better way to do things by tapping the advances of today’s technology. It’s that thinking that led me to the Voyage-Air design. I often hear, ‘Why didn’t someone think of this before?’ The reason is two-fold: First, the more you ‘know’ about the details the less you might see of the big picture. For example, if you are endlessly debating the merits of dovetail vs. bolt-on neck design, then thinking about folding a guitar is completely outside of your realm of thought. Secondly, now is the time to meet the artist’s need for portability. In this portable age of laptop computers and cell phones, you should also be able to take your guitar wherever you go. That’s what Voyage-Air is all about.”
Click here for a letter from CEO Jeff Cohen