GENE BAKER OF B3 GUITARS
As a kid growing up in the 1970s, if the guitar was to be your destiny, you could do a lot worse than to be born in Detroit ‘Motor City’ Michigan, and have a best friend whose older cousin was in a band that played nothing but Kiss songs. So it was for Gene Baker, who was driven inexorably towards rock from a young age, and towards building the tools of rock at an age not much older than that.
Once playing turned into making, Baker found himself taking high-school woodworking classes and that infallible smash-and-rebuild route of dissecting and getting into the guts of budget-friendly imports. In order to learn more about the craft, he absorbed every ounce of knowledge he could from magazines, the scant books available, and reluctant local guitar repairmen. Like many a young American guitar fanatic, he was driven to study at the Guitar Institute of Technology (GIT), part of Hollywood’s Musicians Institute. Baker emerged at the tender age of 19 thinking he would play the guitar for a living – only to soon decide that trekking to Alaska and back in a low-paying cover band was less conducive to
