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Guitar builder and repairman Joe Glaser lives in the Nashville area, where he's operated Glaser Instruments for 35 years. With its staff of seven repairpersons, the shop focuses on a locally based recording and touring clientele and the considerable number of players for whom Nashville is a critical crossroads.

When Joe first moved to Nashville from Palo Alto, California, to become a guitar builder, he earned most of his living playing pedal steel as he built up customers. As Nashville music turned away from the late-'70s pop influence to a more traditional sound, the guitars he built for Ricky Skaggs, Steve Wariner, Brent Mason, and Jim Olander caught on, and his three-pickup Tele with a String Bender essentially became his trademark. After producing a line of 5-string electric mandolins, Dano-style tic-tac basses, and "Lap Strats" in the early '80s, he quit building to repair full time. In 2002, he became a partner in PLEK, a Berlin-based company that manufactures a CNC tool used in repair shops and factories to do precise though personalized fret work, nut cutting, inlay, etc. His role in engineering concepts, business development, and production implementation has led him to interesting involvement with clients such as Martin, Gibson, Suhr, Santa Cruz, and Fodera.

Attributing it to boredom or a short attention span, Glaser has always been involved in innovation and problem solving. This has led to a number of products, standard solutions, and some software platforms, all aimed at making local solutions more widely available. "Instruments and players can be viewed as types," Joe says, "but, really, every single one is different. For me, the fun, challenge, and reward is in tackling the endless variations of that player/instrument relationship to see wonderful artists and instruments through to memorable music."