About

About Rich Hoeg

For more than four decades, Rich Hoeg has helped shape and preserve the sound of Northern California, one hand-crafted guitar at a time.

Years before he created iconic instruments for Bob Weir, Steve Miller, Jerry Garcia, and others, Hoeg built his first guitars at home during the late 1970s. A self-taught luthier, he sharpened his skills under the mentorship of Michael Tobias at Sierra Guitars, then teamed up with Danny Ransom to open his own shop, Westwood Custom.

“We spent a few years building guitars in a warehouse in Oakland,” he says of those early years on the work bench. “Around the same time, I got to know Geoff Gould, the original president of Modulus Guitars. He’d done some work in the aerospace industry, where he used graphite carbon fiber to build satellites, because the weight-to-strength ratio was one of the best. When he opened Modulus, he used that same technology to build the first graphite guitars. We talked on the phone a few times, and one day he asked me to come work for Modulus instead.”

Hoeg officially joined the Modulus Guitars staff in 1987. He began on the assembly floor, building instruments according to Modulus’ specs, before his role evolved into designing and crafting some of the company’s most ambitious custom guitars. As Modulus became closely intertwined with the Grateful Dead, Hoeg found himself at the center of a community where craftsmanship and creativity mattered much more than tradition.

Working across the street from the Grateful Dead’s rehearsal space, he became the kind of builder that musicians went to whenever standard solutions just weren’t enough. “Every year, the Grateful Dead would order a bunch of guitars for Phil and Bobby — and occasionally for Jerry, too,” he remembers. “I became their go-to guy. They’d come over and ask me something like, ‘Can you fix Bruce Hornsby’s foot pedal?’ When Phil started playing a Ken Smith bass instead of the Modulus Quantum 6, because Ken Smith basses were much wider than ours, it was my job to design a wider Q6. I did, and Phil went back to playing our stuff.”

That relationship led to a decades-long collaboration with Bob Weir, whose unwavering belief in Rich’s work would soon define Hoeg Guitars. Together, they designed multiple custom instruments, each one solving a musical problem while evolving the very concept of guitar design. Their most recognizable creation — the Blue Lightning Bolt — came together during a few after-hours sessions spent developing new ideas, replacing traditional F-holes with the iconic lightning bolt motif, blending the upper half of the Modulus G3 model with the body size of Weir’s Ibanez George Benson arch top, and placing a graphite plate beneath the fingerboard. The guitar became Weir’s signature instrument during tours with RatDog, Furthur, Dead & Company, and many other projects, earning its reputation as one of the most recognizable guitars in jam-band history.

Rich’s influence extends beyond a single instrument. While at Modulus, he assembled a custom graphite neck-through-body guitar for Jerry Garcia, a pair of matching cocabola-top solid-bodies for Steve Miller, and a bass for Jefferson Airplane’s Jack Casady. He assembled “the Buzzard” — the iconic bass played by The Who’s John Entwistle — and became head of the company’s custom guitar department, where he designed instruments for Sammy Hagar, Phil Lesh, and Dave Matthews Band’s Stephan Lessard. The collaborative work continued during his time at Chandler Guitars, where he designed a baritone lap steel for Bob Brozman, a custom 12-string semi-hollowbody bass for Cheap Trick’s Tom Petersson, and helped build guitars for Aerosmith’s Joe Perry.

Rich launched his own company, Hoeg Guitars, in 2000. Working out of his home workshop in San Francisco, he continued his association with the Grateful Dead community by developing boutique instruments like The Hoeg Classic, The Blueknife, and The Blackknife. Inspired by the guitars he built for Bob Weir during the 1980s, The Blackknife became iconic in its own right, with Hoeg replacing the graphite neck of the Modulus model with mahogany and a 100 year-old Brazilian rosewood fingerboard.

Today, every Hoeg guitar is still built by hand by entrusted luthiers Addam Stark and Zack Jones of Rick Turner Guitars under the tutelage of Rich Hoeg, using superior tonewoods like Brazilian rosewood, Brazilian hardwoods, black maple, swamp ash, and mahogany. The goal is to serve the player, not the marketplace. “I want the neck to be like a comfortable pair of shoes, rather than something you have to get used to,” Hoeg says. “I’ve never professed to making the perfect guitar. I just want something that feels right and sounds right.” Like Rick Turner, Doug Irwin, and Michael Tobias, he’s part of a proud tradition of Northern California luthiery. It’s a tradition based in innovation, human relationships, and the music that helped define an entire culture — and in Rich Hoeg’s work, the tradition lives on.

About Addam Stark

While in high school and working at a local music store, Addam Stark met a wood worker who made mountain dulcimers and started helping out around the shop. A few years later he attended the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery and went straight to working at Santa Cruz Guitar Company, where he ran the finish department and later took part in other areas of production for the next 10 years. In 2003, he was invited by Rick Turner to share the shop space and start his own finishing business, Finish Guitar, for many of the top acoustic and electric builders in the country. In 2022, Addam became a part of the Rick Turner Guitars team where he provides direction, management, and finishes, while maintaining his clientele of high-end luthiers.

About Zack Jones

Zack Jones entered guitar building in his teens, playing music and working on his own guitars, as well as those of fellow students, during high school and his brief time in college. Moving from California to Atlanta, he attended Atlanta Guitar Works before committing to a deeper luthier education at Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery in Phoenix. He returned to Atlanta and operated a Guitar Center repair department until 2018, when he was offered a job by Rick Turner to perform final setups. Coming from a background in folk and improvisational rock music, he found a home among the techniques and technologies developed by Rick. He wears many hats in building, production, and design for Rick Turner Guitars.