A viol maker’s workshop in the Harz.

Marleaux BassGuitars is a small workshop in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, the old mining town in the Harz mountains of Lower Saxony, run by Gerald Marleaux with his wife Heike. The company dates itself to 1990 — “Passion since 1990,” its website says — and the German magazine Gitarre & Bass marked the anniversary in its August 2021 issue, a year late because of the pandemic.

According to that profile, Gerald Marleaux was given a toolbox at nine and built his first bass at twelve, a four-string fretless with a neck-through body of mahogany and oak whose lower half fell off within a year. He learned the basics of plucked-instrument making over several years from the viol maker Emmo Koch, and also trained as a cabinetmaker in a workshop that restored and reproduced baroque furniture, before studying at a technical college for design in Hildesheim. Time in the workshop of the bass builder Andy Schack was formative, the magazine says.

When Koch died in 1988, Marleaux carried on his business, and two years later, in the same premises, officially founded Marleaux BassGuitars. In 2002 the workshop moved to a half-timbered house in Clausthal-Zellerfeld that had been a hardware store; the family lives in the old shop, and the stockroom became the workshop.

One lesson from Koch, the magazine wrote, was never to do something a certain way “because it has always been done that way” or “because everyone does it,” but to question every step — lacquers, glues, wood pairings and the fit of pickup and neck cavities included.

Form follows function — and a linen top.

The first series model was the Consat, which Gitarre & Bass calls a modern classic. Most designs are Gerald Marleaux’s own, following the motto “form follows function,” the magazine says; the exceptions are the Diva fretless, based on the Pagelli bass, and the Contra, from an idea by the bassist Jürgen Attig. The current range, the website shows, runs from the Consat, Betra, Contra, Diva, MBass and Soprano to the Tiuz, the Artio, the Spock and the Votan and Votan XS — which the magazine described as giving Fender-like traits a form of Marleaux’s own — plus custom builds. Fanned-fret instruments are now labelled “V-Scale,” the company says, a name and logo protected by the German maker Le Fay and shared with European colleagues after an American maker protected the usual terms.

Recognition is documented. The Consat Custom four-string won the German Musical Instrument Prize (Deutscher Musikinstrumentenpreis) in 2017, German Wikipedia’s list of winners shows; the company describes it as awarded by the Federal Ministry of Economics.

The newest direction is materials research. Marleaux has worked with the Clausthal University of Technology since 2005, measuring vibration, Gitarre & Bass reported, and later with universities in Göttingen and Kassel. The Spock, tested by the magazine in November 2023, was developed over two years with the university’s Institute for Polymer Materials and Plastics Engineering, with federal funding: its top is a linen natural-fibre composite made by vacuum-assisted resin infusion over a hollowed frame of Dibetou wood. Marleaux says the partners jointly received a Technology Transfer Award in 2025 for the process.

Design and documentation.

Two names came west after the Second World War from Schönbach in Bohemia, now Luby in the Czech Republic. Höfner was founded there by Karl Höfner in 1887 and now works in Baiersdorf in Franconia, where GEWA music took over its business on 1 April 2026 after an insolvency, with the brands held by a Thomann and GEWA holding company. Hoyer, founded in Schönbach by Franz Hoyer in 1874, was re-established at Tennenlohe near Erlangen in 1945 and stopped making guitars in 1987, German Wikipedia says; its website now announces a relaunch in 2027.

Hanika is a Baiersdorf neighbour. Helmut Hanika started his own firm in 1953, making archtop guitars, and later moved to classical guitars, from 1965 by the company’s account and in the 1970s by German Wikipedia’s; the business now belongs to his son Armin, and the company says its instruments are made mostly by hand.

Three are workshops founded by their makers. Lakewood, started in 1986 by Martin Seeliger, builds steel-string guitars at Buseck near Gießen; it says they are built in Germany. Teuffel is Ulrich Teuffel’s company in Neu-Ulm, founded in 1988, he says, and he builds the guitars himself. Marleaux is Gerald Marleaux’s bass workshop at Clausthal-Zellerfeld in the Harz, working since 1990, whose Consat Custom bass won a German musical instrument prize in 2017.

GEWA music is the odd one out, an instrument and accessory company rather than a single workshop: founded at Adorf in the Vogtland by Georg Walther in 1925, it spent five decades in Mittenwald before returning to Adorf, and says it makes products at German, European and Asian sites.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One workshop, regional wood.

Marleaux remains an owner-run workshop: the legal notice on its website names Gerald Marleaux, and the sources we checked show no outside owner. The basses are built in Clausthal-Zellerfeld. In 2021 Gitarre & Bass counted about 160 basses a year, a good third of them sold abroad, made by Gerald, two journeymen and an apprentice, with Heike running the office and logistics — and without CNC milling, not out of ideology, the magazine said, but because the processes were already so refined that CNC would not make them faster. Instruments, it added, are almost never in stock, because nearly everything built is already sold.

The workshop’s signature theme is local wood. Under the name Regio Tone Wood, the company says, it has for more than 20 years selected woods grown in Lower Saxony, in cooperation with the state forests, and air-dried them for years; Regio Tone Wood versions cost no extra. Gitarre & Bass reported that 60 to 70 percent of the timber used comes from the region, that all the maple is felled in the Harz, and that the store held wood for about a thousand basses. Marleaux also had its own truss rods made locally, the magazine said.

The brand is visible mainly through players and trade shows. In 2023 Gitarre & Bass tested a Consat Signature five-string in Regio Tone Wood made for Henning Protzmann, the bassist of Panta Rhei and Karat. For its 25th anniversary the company started the Tiefgang Bass Camp, and for 2026 its website announced appearances at the NAMM Show in Anaheim, on the stand of Richter Straps, and at the Guitar Summit in Mannheim.

For a design guide, Marleaux shows how a one-workshop brand can be built on materials as much as shapes — Harz maple, a numbered online gallery of Consat basses, and a linen-topped bass. Compare Warwick, the larger German bass maker, and Schaller, whose tuners appear on the Spock. For this guide we use forest green, maple and linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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