Meet the guitar maker to the stars
The guitar is a mythical and—let’s face it—badass instrument. Consider the wild stories about players selling their souls to the devil, instruments smashed and lit on fire onstage, and the existence of air-guitar competitions. And while Guitar Hero didn’t last, what gamer would have lined up to buy something called Clarinet Hero or Flute Hero?
There is even a mystery right now over whether the Fender Stratocaster that Bob Dylan played when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival had actually turned up in a New Jersey woman’s attic or whether, as his lawyers say, the musician still has it.
But while the guitar is more than the sum of its parts, its parts are what first captivated entrepreneur Gabriel Currie, whose mother took him at age 10 to a guitar repair shop called Guitar Doctor in Burbank, California.
“There were guys working away in various stages of guitar building, and I thought these were just magical tools,” Currie recalls. “I went home immediately, went into my dad’s garage, took out a piece of wood and put knobs on it.”
That was the beginning, but not the end. Last year, Currie—who spent years learning the ropes of guitar making from some of the industry’s top teachers—launched his own company, Echopark Guitars in Echo Park, California. Currie—who is also called “a master luthier”— is part of a recent trend in small-shop, boutique guitar makers building high-end electric guitars completely by hand.