Two unfinished Koll Duo Glide necks (left), a Jason Z. Schroeder neck
(middle), and a b3 neck lay atop a selection of routed and unrouted
neck blanks and fretboard slabs. Photo by Joe Coffey
A stack of Giffin Valiants
after having binding ap-
plied (back) and a couple
more waiting to have their
necks glued in.
Photo by Joe Coffey
CNC templates for a Giffin Valiant headstock and fretboard. Photo by Joe Coffey
A rack of CNC routing templates for (top to bottom) Fano, Koll,
and Jason Z. Schroeder bodies. Photo by Joe Coffey
Realizing that it would take some Business 101 to keep a successful shop running, Baker decided to get some field training. He
went to work for the Gibson Custom Shop in Hollywood, where
he became a senior master’s apprentice to Roger Gibson. Baker calls
Gibson his first real mentor—someone who knew and understood
guitars, and was able to guide him through the little nuances of
building and repair that he hadn’t learned yet.
The pair worked well together and absorbed the luxuries of their
location in West Hollywood. “We were right in the Studio Row area,
where there were tons of recording studios and a lot of session players
that we’d do work for,” Baker says. “I got to work on all these vintage
Fenders, Gibsons—just a slew of vintage guitar history that otherwise
I wouldn’t have been privileged to work on, which really got me into
vintage guitars and paved the way for what I’d do later at Fender.”
Baker attributes much of his success as an independent builder
to his time working in Fender’s Custom Shop, where he started in
1993 after declining to follow Gibson to Nashville. He was ini-
tially brought in as sanding and buffing support before heading up
the Robben Ford department and eventually being promoted to
Master, and then Senior Master Builder. “I got to build a lot of gui-
tars from the ground up,” he says. “We had to build all the necks
and bodies and the little custom features, like mid-’60s round lam’
necks, a lot of the big peghead necks—a lot of times even double-
neck guitars, Bajo Sextos, rosewood Teles—things like that.
“I still didn’t have any real business background,” says Baker,
“but while I was at Fender I was going to night school to plan my
escape.” In the summer of 1999, he opened Baker Guitars, taking
with him a friend and all of his 401k investments.
But the fate of Baker Guitars was sealed, so it seems, from day
one. A faulty CNC machine resulted in an agreement with the
CNC manufacturer, in which they agreed to take back and fix the
machine while paying back Baker’s loan with the financing company. If only they had. A year later, the financing company came
after Baker Guitars for the unpaid CNC loan, forcing the company
to declare bankruptcy and liquidate its assets.
“The liquidation was kind of like attending my own funeral,”
says Baker. “I was even fighting with some guy over my own bench
tuner.” Baker let the other guy win, but he didn’t admit defeat. It
took three years of laying low and shelling out payments to the
bank before he was in the clear to start a shop again, which he did
in the spring of 2004 with nothing but a storage locker. This time
he named his business Fine Tuned Instruments.
Rising from Ruin
Without tools or materials, Baker had to work backward. People who
had acquired unfinished guitars at the time of liquidation looked to
him for final assembly, prompting him to buy the tools necessary to
finish what he’d begun years before. Slowly, his business started rolling again. But as more business came in, there was more pressure to
expand, and he found himself looking for a partner. “This time I didn’t
want any bank loans or silent partners,” he says. “I wanted to bring in
someone who had everything from attorney skills to business management and even manufacturing skills—someone with enough money
and enough brains to turn this thing into something bigger than just
