Baker’s Fine Tuned Instruments
Gene Baker, locally-located guitar manufacturer and the original proprietor of Baker guitars, is all about the music. With over thirty years of experience building guitars and playing music, he has already definitely dedicated his life to the melodies of the soul, and made a name for himself on both the production and the performance sides of the music business. And he’s not quite finished; Baker is still at it today, carrying on his tradition of quality instruments and good tunes. “I consider them to be tools for tone purists,” he mentions on his website.
Raised in Detroit, Baker started working on guitars when he was in the seventh grade, mostly with bodies, scraping parts off one guitar for another. He moved to the Central Coast area in 1982 during his high school years. A few years after graduating he scored a job at the west coast Gibson custom shop, a one-man operation in Los Angeles. Under that mentor, Roger Giffin, he was able to see what exactly went into building a guitar. “I had been building guitars before then, but I didn’t really have any guided direction. At that time it was also a repair shop, so we worked on almost anyone’s guitar, it could be anything.” If the pace wasn’t enough to keep Baker on his toes, the clientele may have been. Giffin had a reputation good enough to bring big names such as Joe Walsh and Eddie Van Halen knocking for all sorts of pre-tour repair needs. This was the launch pad for Baker’s talent, “I got a lot of my chops figured out, a lot of my repair skills really honed.”
That chapter lasted until 1993 when Gibson decided to shut down the shop and move their operations to Nashville. Fortunately, Baker had a good relationship with Fender, mostly due to working together with them over the years trading parts and whatnot, and was able to become hired within a month. He dubs working at Fender his “acceleration point”, as it was there where he was able to see guitar production from all sorts of angles. Keeping busy didn’t stop Baker from wanting to move back to the Central Coast, however. “The dream was to one day be able to move back home and build guitars so we can live where it was more [about] quality of life instead of city life.” The transition from Fender to his own business, Baker Guitars, wasn’t entirely easy. Beginning in 1997, although his building knowledge was top notch, the business aspect was very new territory, which ultimately resulted in a bankruptcy in 2003. It was during these years that the Baker name became synonymous with quality craftsmanship and tone. “Baker Guitars was about five or six years of hard knocks learning. But at the same token I think we built around a thousand guitars by the time we closed.”
These days find Baker in his Arroyo Grande wood shop, building guitars under the name of Fine Tuned Instruments, specializing in the “b3” models (stands for built by Baker). The latest company has already made about two hundred guitars since its 2006 inception. A new showroom is planned to be built in the front of the shop; until then the website, FineTunedInstruments.com, is the place to see these stringed beauties. Baker also performs in the Mean Gene Band, a rock group that plays out locally anywhere from Lompoc to Paso Robles. A simple note of caution: as you may very well imagine, this guy shreds.
