Professional woodworker by day, and one-man manufacturer of quarter-scale guitars by night, Cal Thompson is the kind of guy who looks good for his age. It’s only when the Vancouver music scene veteran talks about his original vision for Little Guitar Army that you get a sense of how long he’s been living and breathing rock ’n ’roll.

The axeman, who is also known as Little Black Wings, put together the first edition of Little Guitar Army in 2007, but in many ways he started laying the groundwork for the band a decade ago. Back then he was working as a luthier with notable Vancouver guitar maker Jean Larrivée. At the end of each shift, he realized a lot of wood was being thrown in the trash each day.

“Everything that he [Larrivée] would have as an off-cut, I would put in my backpack and haul home on the SeaBus,” Thompson says. “I would design these guitars basically around everything that was being thrown away.”

His first little guitar took about a week to get from brilliant idea to finished product. “That was years and years and years ago,” Thompson notes. “Ever since then, I don’t even own a full-sized guitar. I own about 60 guitars, and none of them are full-sized.”

Bertman notes that these small-scale axes are jokingly referred to as bonsai guitars by LGA, which also includes drummer Craig McKimm, bassist Rich Hopkins, and guitarists Markus Lander, Nick Venditti, Frank “Chopper” Sivertz, Chad Winquist, and Tony Bardach. Dean acknowledges that playing Thompson’s mini-axes requires some getting used to.

“The tension is a little more intense, and the tuning is a little different,” he says. “We tune to C sharp. Black Sabbath is in C-sharp. I wanted to play along with some Sabbath and realized we’re one octave higher. I was like ‘This is a piccolo guitar—a soprano guitar—and I love it.”