SHOP TALK DON GROSH GUITAR MAKER
Small-shop guitar makers have been popping up like mushrooms in a dank cellar in recent years. All enthusiastically claim to have learnt their craft by studying the inimitable vintage instruments that have passed through their hands. To be honest, though, unless you’re working in the right place at the right time, the average entry-level repairman’s exposure to Blackguard Teles, slab-board Strats and ’59 Les Pauls is likely to be pretty minimal. But a job with one of LA’s hottest custom guitar makers of the mid-to-late 1980s? Yeah, you could call that the right place at the right time.
That’s exactly where Don Grosh learnt his craft. Some 35 years since he took up the trade, Don and his eponymous Grosh Guitars are long resettled in the more pastoral location of Broomfield, Colorado, on the edge of the Rocky Mountains a few miles north of Denver. It’s here that a rigorous drive to maintain standards and consistency, and a constant appreciation of the lessons learnt in that LA hot seat, continues to help his team of five turn out some of the best-respected boutique electrics available today.
SOCAL STATE OF MIND
Grosh was born in 1961 in Glendale, California. His family moved to the Santa Clarita Valley, where he grew up, two years later. “I have two older brothers and a
