Northfield
Mandolins & Guitars
EST. 2007 | usa
Archtop | Acoustic | Electric Guitars | Mandolins
“These instruments represent the very best of what we currently know how to do.”
Adrian bagale | Luthier
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The company began with a deceptively simple ambition: do one thing and do it exceptionally well. Adrian Bagale was living in Qingdao, China, after years of working in musical instrument development when he and a small group of collaborators from China and Japan decided to concentrate their experience on one of the most demanding instruments they knew how to make: the carved F-style mandolin.
They spent years developing those first instruments before bringing Northfield to the public. What followed was not a conventional product roadmap. The mandolin led to the octave mandolin. The octave mandolin opened new tonal and musical territory. Collaborations with musicians introduced new questions. Acoustic instruments became electrified. Different scales, forms, tunings, materials, and construction methods were explored. Eventually, that trail led back to the guitar.
Northfield works today from workshops in Marshall, Michigan, and Qingdao, China. But describing them simply as two manufacturing locations misses an essential part of the company. Northfield was built around long-standing relationships between people who develop and make instruments together. Both workshops are capable of building instruments from beginning to end, and knowledge, ideas, processes, and experimentation move in both directions.
That structure reflects an important Northfield belief: the quality of an instrument is determined by the people making it, not the country printed on its label. The company has deliberately resisted dividing its instruments into geographic hierarchies. A Northfield is intended to be understood first as a Northfield.
Tradition remains an important reference point. The landmark American mandolins and archtop instruments of the early twentieth century are studied carefully, but never treated as the end of the conversation. Northfield combines that historical understanding with contemporary design, CNC machining, 3D modelling and printing, frequency analysis, new materials, and an unusually collaborative development process. Replication and consistency matter, but so does the freedom to experiment.
The Artist Series, developed through a long relationship with Mike Marshall, is perhaps the clearest expression of that philosophy. More than a decade after the first instruments were made, Northfield has been able to study how its own work has aged, listen to what musicians have learned from living with those instruments, and allow that experience to shape the next generation.
The Rival guitar, joining the Boutique Guitar Showcase enTour in 2026, continues the same story. Its roots reach through Northfield's Archtop Octave Mandolin and ultimately back into the company's long relationship with guitars themselves. For a company known for mandolins, building guitars might appear to be a departure. Inside Northfield, it feels much more like coming home.
What connects all of it is curiosity: about instruments, about musicians, about sound, and about what might happen when a familiar idea is given somewhere new to go.
Watch Elden Kelly perform “Variations on a California Hotel” on the Northfield Rival Archtop Guitar, paired with Henriksen and Humphrey amps. A musical demo showcasing the Rival’s warm archtop voice, responsiveness, and versatility.
the rival
demo
boutique guitar showcase entour | 2026
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adrian bagale | Luthier
“I just wanted to know if it was possible… ultimately maybe affect music…by creating instruments that people play new music on.”
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That interest in playing soon became an interest in understanding how instruments worked. Adrian found his way into the broader musical instrument industry not through business school or a carefully plotted career plan, but through curiosity. He wanted to understand instruments, develop them, make things he wanted to play, and see whether an instrument itself could contribute something to the music that followed.
His work in product development eventually took him to China. After travelling there beginning in the early 2000s, Adrian moved to Qingdao with his wife and young child, initially on a one-way ticket. What began as professional relationships grew into something much deeper. The builders and collaborators he met there became friends, colleagues, and eventually family; their children grew up knowing one another and team members travelled back and forth between China and the United States.
After years of developing instruments and accessories across an enormous range of categories, Adrian reached a point where he wanted to narrow the focus: to do one thing and do it exceptionally well. He found collaborators who felt the same way, including colleagues from China and Japan. They chose the mandolin partly because it presented one of the greatest challenges they could give themselves.
Northfield grew from that decision.
What followed has been much less calculated than the resulting company might suggest. Adrian readily describes himself as a reluctant businessman. Northfield's expansion from traditional mandolins into octave instruments, electric instruments, and eventually guitars has largely followed musicians, musical ideas, unanswered questions, and Adrian's own tendency to disappear down an interesting rabbit hole.
That curiosity is paired with an unusually human view of instrument making. Adrian has resisted the idea that the country where an instrument is made should determine how its craftsmanship is perceived. For him, Northfield's workshops in Michigan and Qingdao are not a domestic shop and an overseas supplier. They are teams of people who have spent years learning from one another and developing instruments together.
He remains deeply interested in vintage instruments, modern manufacturing technology, jazz, bluegrass, improvisational music, gear, design, and the ways musicians continually reshape the tools placed in their hands. Listening to players is as important to the process as looking backward at historic instruments.
Nearly twenty years into Northfield, the company's arrival at the guitar brings Adrian's story back to where it began. After travelling from jazz guitar to mandolin, across continents and through an expanding family of instruments, he describes the return to six strings simply as a homecoming.
For Adrian, however, arriving somewhere has never meant that the questions stop.
