Meet Ellis

Ellis Hahn

Ellis began their guitar making career in 2002 apprenticing at a repair shop in Chicago. Three years later, Ellis decided to move to NYC and jumped at the chance to work at Sadowsky Guitars, widely considered the best luthiers in the city.

Ellis was originally hired to do fret work and body sanding back, but moved on to final assembly in 2006 and by 2013 became the shop manager. Working at the Sadowsky shop allowed them to hone their repair skills and at the same time grow into a professional guitar maker.

Over the course of their 16-year tenure, he built at least a thousand instruments. Each instrument was a new lesson: whether it was about wood combinations, electronics, building techniques, or in problem solving. Every lesson added up to the best education in bass building on the planet.

While Ellis has been building instruments since 2002, the first bass with “LEH” on the headstock was built in 2011 and the first Offset was completed in 2018.

The Offset was designed to be the first “repeatable” bass design, but also put to work so many of the ideas and improvements to the classic “Fender” building style that Ellis had been ruminating on for years.

In 2021, Ellis left their job at Sadowsky guitars and moved west to work at LEH full time. The years since have been nothing short of a dream come true.

2023 brought the release of the Jetstream, a 34” scale bass still Offset but with a slightly Jazzier shape. 2024 saw the release of a 32” medium scale 4 string designed to fit in a guitar sized gig bag.