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Phoenix Guitar Company Profile
Arizona shop offers custom guitars, repairs, and lutherie courses.
By Russell Letson

The Phoenix Guitar Co. of Scottsdale, Arizona, is a small custom shop that not only hand-builds, repairs, and restores guitars but also offers classes in the craft of lutherie. This triple focus is essential to both the business model and the working styles of shop partners George Leach and Diana Huber.

Leach started repairing and building guitars in the late 1980s while still an engineer at Intel, and he started the first incarnation of the Phoenix Guitar Co. in 1994. Before and after opening the shop, he took classes from such master builders as William Cumpiano, Tom Ribbecke, Dale Unger, and Frank Finocchio. In 2001, Leach started offering classes of his own, and Huber, a telecom-software tester with an interest in lutherie, was one of his first students. She soon started helping out with the teaching, and when Leach retired from Intel in 2006, she joined him as a business partner in a reconstituted Phoenix Guitar Company in a new, fully redesigned shop.

Leach and Huber can each handle any task in the shop, a situation that suits both of them. “We both like being able to work on different things,” says Leach. “I focus on most of the repairs, Diana is able to focus more on building, and we both do the classes.” For her part, after years in software, Huber likes working with her hands and producing something tangible. A guitar, she says, is “playable art. It’s not going to just sit there and collect dust.”

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