“I started in a low-level position in the repair shop,” Grosh tells us, “then I started building some guitars. First-call session aces Larry Carlton, Lee Ritenour and Tommy Tedesco were among the devoted clientele, along with stars such as Lukather, Robben Ford, Mitch Holder, Duane Eddy and dozens of others. By the time Grosh joined the team a decade later – well before the sale of the brand name to Samick, and then more recently to Gibson – it had become known as the premier custom-guitar maker and pro shop in the Los Angeles area. Valley Arts Guitars was founded by Mike McGuire and Al Carness in the mid-70s. That influenced me to want to learn, but I didn’t start playing guitar until I was 19.” My oldest brother, Bill, was a keyboard player, and Glen was playing acoustic guitar. “I have two older brothers and a younger brother,” Grosh relates, “so growing up in the 60s and 70s I was very influenced by the music they were listening to. Grosh was born in 1961 in Glendale, California, and his family moved to the Santa Clarita Valley two years later, where he grew up. It’s here that a rigorous drive to maintain standards and consistency, and a constant appreciation of the lessons learned in that LA hot seat, continues to help his team of five turn out some of the best-respected boutique electrics available today. 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. That’s exactly where Don Grosh learned his craft. 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 and the right time. 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 pretty minimal.
Small-shop guitar makers have been popping up like mushrooms in a dank cellar in recent years, one after another enthusiastically claiming to have learned their craft by studying the great vintage instruments that have passed through their hands.
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