Rick Turner, 1943 – 2022

Rick Turner was a polymath: a professional musician, an inventor, a luthier, and an electronics wizard. And yet he was also one of the most approachable people in the world of music. For so many instrument fanatics and builders, he was a resource we could count on. His own instruments helped thousands of famous and unknown musicians to sound their best. All the while, he helped countless builders (even his competition) get better at their craft with free advice and help. Obscure 1930’s Vivi Tone guitars, tools, pickups, bass construction? He knew everything.

Turner passed away on April 17, 2022 at the age of 78. It seems incredible that someone who was always there for our small community – on the phone, at trade shows, online forums and social media – has left. Having outlived so many of his rock and roll peers, he seemed almost immortal. Luckily we still have his designs, guitars, basses and ukulele to ponder.

Rick has lived through so much music history and his memory was as sharp as his chisels. He was a fixture on the Cambridge music scene, playing for Ian & Sylvia. With his trusty D-28, Turner backed the duo to clubs across the country and in Newport in 1965 (the same year Dylan went electric!). That same year he personally installed a 6 1/2 fret on Richard and Mimi Farina’s dulcimer. This is standard on many dulcimers built today, but he did it first.

Just a few years later he went electric himself with the band Autosalvage. The NYC-based group was signed to RCA and released a self-titled record in 1968 (listen to it on YouTube here). If they were based in California, they might have grabbed the limelight, but their debut fell flat with the East Coast crowds (though they did once get to open at Cafe Au Go Go for Richard Pryor). As with so many bands ahead of their time, the album has a certain cult following today. It has since been re-released and original copies fetch good money on Discogs.

Turner left that group, moved to California and found himself at Alembic in 1970 alongside Owsley “Bear” Stanley, Ron Wickersham and Bob Matthews. There he handcrafted pickups, designed guitars and basses, and was at the forefront of the Grateful Dead’s McIntosh-powered 125,000-watt wall-of-sound experiment. You’ve no doubt seen or heard of his creations or mods from that era: The Dead, The Youngbloods, Hot Tuna, the Mothers of Invention, and numerous other acts of the ’60s and ’70s had custom stills. Jack Casady still plays his alembic, as does David Crosby. Rick and I once emailed each other about amplification and pickups and he wrote, “I just wish Garcia and Owsley were still around to discuss this shit. You got this stuff. That’s why they accepted me into this circle in 1969. They knew exactly where I came from.”

Turner plays David Crosby’s 12-string in the Alembic for the first time. It’s a thin hollowbody Gibson Crest with a solid Brazilian rosewood neck crafted by luthier Mario Matello. Turner made the bronze tailpiece, Alembic peghead inlay and true stereo humbucking pickups. LED position markers have been inlaid into the fretboard binding. David Crosby still uses this guitar today and everything still works, even the LED markers. Photo: Gary Somberg, reprinted from Fretboard Journal #25.

Turner worked at Alembic for almost a decade before starting his own business in 1978. One of his first creations was his Model 1, an electric guitar inspired by the shape of his 1820s Stauffer guitar. That’s Turner in a nutshell: a guy who knew enough about musical instrument history to go back 160 years and come up with a design that, with a cutaway added, would be the ultimate electric guitar shape. (Later he often praised the architecture behind whimsical Howe Orme instruments, also from the 19th century.)

The Model 1 was quickly adopted by Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham, who bought the second prototype (above) and picked it up tusk tour, and has been using it tirelessly ever since. If you want to rock your world and see the intricacies of handcrafted guitar building, check out the beautiful drawings made by former Turner apprentice Barry Price (PDF link) of assembling a Model 1.

Turner’s career was not without twists and turns. The early 80’s were lean and he got into furniture and furniture making. He also worked as a consultant for major guitar brands. In 1988 he accepted a full-time position at Gibson as West Coast Artist Relations Manager. It’s hard to imagine this arrangement lasting long; Gibson’s sales were notorious at the time, and Turner was never one to compromise. He once told me a hilarious story from that era when he pitched Chris Thile to Gibson’s corporate leadership for an endorsement deal. Chris was just eight years old at the time. “I thought he was the future of the mandolin,” Turner said. “Hey, what the hell did I know? Well, the boss men thought I was crazy to suggest signing an eight-year-old kid. No, I had to study Billboard’s ‘Top 100’ chart and reach for it.”

Although he signed Guns N’ Roses and various other pre-grade acts as Gibson artists, Turner always thought of himself first and foremost as a guitar designer. He spent hours working on piezo pickup designs and acoustic amplification. When Gibson ignored many of their design pitches, he struck a deal so he could keep the designs they didn’t want to produce (his Electroline bass was one such model). Eventually he moved on and did repair work at Fred Walecki’s Westwood Music, repairing the guitars of many of his old Alembic clients as well as guys like Jackson Browne and David Lindley. He went even deeper down the piezo pickup rabbit hole.

Inspired by his connections to Browne and former Alembic customer David Crosby, he helped design the Highlander pickup. Around this time there was a renewed interest in his Model 1 guitar and he started building them again. Bill Asher of Asher Guitars worked with Turner for a time, honing his repair skills while Turner built new instruments. In the mid-’90s, Turner relocated to Santa Cruz and became a fixture in the area’s thriving guitar scene.

Turner really was a jack of all trades: restoration work, new electrics, new acoustics, amplification, bass and guitars His Renaissance instrument series combined his passion for acoustic and electric instruments. He got into digital signal processing and even had a side business with Seymour Duncan, D-TAR (short for “Duncan-Turner Acoustic Research”), where he helped design acoustic pickups and preamps. “What I learned about guitar making and pickup design was driven by my own frustration as a professional player,” he once told me. “Another topic that I’m very interested in is how much I learned about acoustic guitar design through the D-TAR Mama Bear project, where I had to think incredibly deeply about what an acoustic guitar body does to the string signal to get a to produce a characteristic sound. I may have learned more from the thought process of creating a digital model of signal conversion than I’ve learned in almost 50 years of banging on ceilings… and it’s now impacted how I view all-acoustic guitar building.”

Turner continued, “What is the distinctive sound of an acoustic guitar? It’s a shitty mess… which we find utterly compelling. Why? Because the physical limitations of wood and air transform a relatively simple audio signal into something far more complex. It’s 3D EQ. Frequencies, levels, and time smear.” (In the spirit of full disclosure, I believe at this point I knew my email conversation with Rick was getting to be too much, and I didn’t dig much deeper. I now regret that. )

When ukuleles boomed in the 2000s, so did Rick Turner. This rock and guitar legend – one of the last keepers of the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound secrets – can be seen at ukulele festivals and club meets selling his new line of Compass Rose ukuleles. He really did everything.

I suppose the one constant across all of Turner’s output—the legendary Alembic Pretzel, the Model One, his Renaissance Steel, and even his ukuleles—was his dedication to tone. Turner made unconventional-looking instruments that were shaped by sound. They weren’t designed to look trendy or cool or sell in the big department stores, they were designed for working musicians who wanted to sound their best. And as technology evolved, so did his creations.

Last but not least, Turner’s contribution to the world cannot be overstated rest the guitar community. Everything he knew – whether it was saddle pickups, struts, Jack Casady’s alembics, Jerry Garcia or anything else – was open source. You only had to ask. Luthier Jason Kostal wrote, “He loved making people laugh and was great at helping people see that their mistakes weren’t as catastrophic as we usually think…. most importantly, he was always there for a late-night call if I needed help.” That sentiment was shared by dozens of other major builders on social media today. He never viewed fellow guitarists as competition; he was always there.

Quite a few of us civilians experienced that too. You would read a thread on Facebook or on a guitar or bass forum only to find the topic of the thread (Rick) with his own color comment. “Is that that Rick Turner…in response to my little Facebook question?” Yes, and a lot has happened. It was one of the many things that made our little universe and Rick so unique.

RIP, Rick. We will miss you.

Bottom: Turner with Jack Casady at Fretboard Summit 2016. Photo: Tim Whitehouse