I’ve been a guitar technician for over 18 years, starting with tinkering on my own stuff around 14 years old. After high school, I went to GIT in Hollywood, California, and after graduating from the program I decided to take their Guitar Craft Academy course. I learned instrument design, fabrication, and repair and graduated top of my class. I’ve made a living in Luthiery ever since, both in repai
r and in building guitars. Shortly after moving back home to Cincinnati, Ohio, I started working for Guitar Center as a full time repair technician. Over the next 5 years, I built GC Cincinnati into a $10,000/month revenue stream from my repair services, eventually being promoted to manage the repair staff of our district, from Cleveland down to Louisville and over to Pittsburgh, with 12 stores and 15 technicians reporting to me.
In 2017, I was hired as an instructor at the Guitar Craft Academy that opened in Nashville. While there, I learned PLEK machine operation and fretwork from the master himself, Joe Glaser, and his wonderfully talented crew of technicians. I was fortunate enough to work on instruments for Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, Bela Fleck, Tom Petersson, Tommy Emmanuel, Joe Bonamassa, Kings of Leon, Audley Freed, Keith Urban, Guthrie Trapp, John Cowan, Victor Wooten, Reb Beach, and countless other wonderfully talented musicians in the studio session scene. Specializing in vintage instrument restoration and repair, we worked on some of the premier examples of guitars and basses from the 1940’s to today, routinely seeing 1950’s Les Pauls, 1950’s and 60’s Fenders, 1940’s Gibson and Martin acoustics, you name it and we fixed it. After a year of working for Joe, I was offered a position running Repairs and Warranty Services for Swee Lee Music, Asia’s largest music retailer and distributor, with stores in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia, as well as dealerships in China and Brunei. I operated under the name Well Played Gear as a partnership with Swee Lee Music. After 3 1/2 years of life in Asia, dealing with the 2020 pandemic over there, it was time to come back to the United States. In May of 2021 we relocated to San Diego, California. I was offered a job at Taylor Guitars as a part of their in-house repair team.
