In 2025, L.R. Baggs celebrates 50 years in the business. Reason enough to sit down with the man himself, a raconteur par excellence, and discuss his colorful career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Congratulations on your 50th anniversary. I\u2019ll assume that back in the mid-\u201970s, you weren\u2019t thinking you\u2019d be here five decades later.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n No, that\u2019s for sure. At that point I could hardly find my ass with two hands and a flashlight! So I feel pretty dang fortunate to have survived and thrived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You started off playing cello, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yeah, I was on a professional career path as a cellist. My teacher was Joseph DiTullio, first chair of the L.A. Philharmonic. He also did work for [the studio orchestra of] 20th Century Fox, and he said he was going to start subbing me on dates that he couldn\u2019t take. Then I broke my left hand very badly in a fistfight. I\u2019m not sure it needed to be a career-ending injury, but it certainly put me off the thing for a number of years. In the meantime, I was in college having a blast, and whatever I was doing then seemed more interesting than playing cello.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then you picked up guitar?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n First I tried to play harmonica, and I was terrible. Then I tried to play guitar, and I was not quite as terrible. Still pretty bad, though. But I was<\/em> a pretty good woodworker\u2014I was into Japanese joinery and building things without fasteners\u2014and I got interested in building guitars. So I bought some wood, and a book that gave you some ideas. I had this beautiful oval-hole carved-top American Washburn that I thought was the best thing I\u2019d ever seen, and I set about copying that. After six months in my garage in Berkeley, I emerged with this thing that is a testament to glue and clamps. I had it on my wall for years, and every time I\u2019d walk by it I\u2019d wince, expecting it to explode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your day job back then was printmaking.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I was a fine-art lithographer. I\u2019d work with artists to create limited-edition prints, and one of those artists was Ry Cooder\u2019s [then] wife [Susan Titelman]. Through her I got to know Ry. One day I showed him the guitar I\u2019d made, and he asked me to build one for him. I said, \u201cTwist my arm a little harder,\u201d and my career as a builder was off and running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building guitars, not pickups.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Right. But I was always interested in tone. And the thing that struck me was that in every book I could get my hands on about building guitars, the chapter on tone was like two or three pages long and basically said, \u201cGood luck.\u201d With my cello background, I had this idea that there might be more knowledge in violin making than in acoustic guitars. I became a part of this group called the Catgut Acoustical Society. These were scientists who were trying to reverse-engineer Stradivarius violins by analyzing their vibrations. I mean physicists, electrical engineers, pretty heavy people. I tried to duplicate the tests they were doing, and that eventually was a tremendous help to me in understanding how a pickup worked or didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What turned you from a guitar builder into a pickup manufacturer?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That also goes back to Ry. He called me from the Warner Brothers studio one afternoon\u2014I\u2019d just finished a second acoustic guitar for him\u2014and he said, \u201cCome down here, there\u2019s something I think you need to see.\u201d So I go in, and he plays me a track from [what eventually became Cooder\u2019s 1979 album] Bop Till You Drop<\/em>. My jaw was on the floor. I\u2019d been putting pickups in his guitars that I\u2019d made, and he had this rack the size of a refrigerator that he traveled with to try and make everything work, but mostly he just swore at it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I think that\u2019s called on-the-job training.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Life on the cutting edge of acoustic amplification! So anyway, I said, \u201cHow in the heck did you record that guitar? It sounds incredible.\u201d I thought he was using my new guitar. Ry says, \u201cWell, that\u2019s what I wanted to show you.\u201d He\u2019d been touring Japan a year or so before and he\u2019d visited the Takamine factory. The guitar on the track was a Takamine, not mine. He said, \u201cThis is pretty good, isn\u2019t it? Certainly better than what we\u2019ve been doing. I thought you needed to know about it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trying to be helpful, I guess, but maybe a bit harsh.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I was the funniest combination of elated and crushed that could probably exist between one person\u2019s two ears. I went out and sat in my car for about 30 minutes, letting the whole thing soak in, and I decided right then and there, \u201cOkay, this is the future of acoustic guitar, and I need to be part of it.\u201d So at the very next NAMM show, I met with [Takamine\u2019s then president] Mr. [Mass] Hirade and basically negotiated that he would sell me ten pickups a year for the guitars I was making. He said, \u201cThat\u2019s all you want?\u201d I said, \u201cYep.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n A few months later, here come a couple of Takamine pickups, and of course I had to take one apart, and I just went, \u201cThat\u2019s all there is to it?\u201d Little did I know then how sophisticated it really was. But those pickups were in an aluminum housing so big that . . . well, you\u2019d never put one of those in a nice guitar. I said, \u201cCrap, I\u2019m not gonna use this,\u201d and I set about reverse-engineering the thing. In about a year, I had the LB6. All I was trying to do was clone the Takamine sound, but in a form that you could put in a Martin or Gibson or Taylor and wouldn\u2019t ruin it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that was the turning point?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, along the way my wife and I had our first child, and I stopped building. Oh man, I kept Jackson Browne waiting a year for a guitar, and I pissed off my whole waiting list. I decided I didn\u2019t want to build guitars anymore. And so I was broke. I took a job selling cars for four years while I put the business back together: working on the pickups, trying to figure them out, taking them to music stores, selling them one by one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What enabled you to get going full time again?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Making an OEM [original equipment manufacturer] deal with Taylor was foundational. But then we had what we call the black summer of \u201987, where we started having epoxy failure. About every other pickup we sent out was breaking. It took three or four months to figure out what was going on. Bob [Taylor, co-founder of Taylor Guitars] called me up one morning and said, \u201cI hate to do this, and I hope you solve the problem quickly, but dude, I gotta go with [pickup manufacturer] Larry [Fishman of Fishman Electronics]. We can\u2019t keep this up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n How awful. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It was scary. But shortly after that, Robert Godin [of Godin Guitars] called me and said, \u201cI\u2019ve been hearing your pickups, and I really like \u2019em. Will you sell some to me?\u201d I said, \u201cSure,\u201d and he said, \u201cDo you have a preamp?\u201d I said, \u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I sense a new product line emerging!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I wasn\u2019t an electronics guy; I was a mechanic. So I hired Jim Demeter to design our first preamp and found a local supplier to build it, because I wasn\u2019t gonna build it in my garage. That was big for us. Robert saved our ass. And then, really just as a way to sell more pickups, I came up with the \u201cTelecoustic\u201d guitar. Because of all the experiments I\u2019d done in trying to understand resonance, that guitar sounded more realistic than any previous acoustic-electric. I taught Robert how to build it\u2014I still didn\u2019t want to go back to building guitars\u2014and he put my name on the headstock for a while. That really saved our ass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fast-forward a couple of decades. What led you back into making guitars after all this time?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n About ten years ago, we got honest with ourselves and realized we were tired of being the red-headed stepchild to the electric guitar when it came to fun. A ten-year-old kid can go into Guitar Center, grab an electric guitar off the wall, plug it in, and have a shit-eating grin on his face in 30 seconds. That\u2019s not the typical acoustic live experience, right? Which is a little more like getting a root canal. How can we close that gap and make it pleasurable?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every couple of years, I would take a week and build, trying to figure out what the heck is<\/em> it that can make an acoustic-electric sound like a regular guitar. I can\u2019t say I\u2019d gotten a lot closer, other than eliminating stuff that didn\u2019t work. But then when the pandemic hit, we all started working from home for a while, and this 1,000-square-foot building we have on our property was now my personal shop. So I started building and . . . have you ever heard the term nut bowl?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t think so.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Within the trade, acoustic-electric guitars are known as nut bowls. They\u2019re like the first thing you make in shop class\u2014a chunk of wood that\u2019s hollowed out and you slap a top on them. The first three or four guitars I built were nut bowls. Okay, but not great. Then I realized that the back had to vibrate, like the second skin on a kick drum. It takes more than the vibration of the top to fill out a decent acoustic sound. But if I want the back to be really alive, how am I going to anchor the neck? On a regular acoustic guitar, it\u2019s the back that holds the neck and keeps it from caving into the top. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And your solution was to attach the neck to the sides of the guitar rather than the back?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s right. Putting a support inside the body that anchored the neck to the waist allowed us to voice the top and the back independently of needing to hold the structure, which gave us a lot of freedom. It also held the neck so rigidly that it drove more energy into the top, so it\u2019s got a really wide dynamic range. When you\u2019re amplifying something that actually has some fidelity, you get better results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How\u2019s the response been to the AEG-1 so far?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n For most people, it came out of nowhere. I wasn\u2019t known as a builder anymore. But it\u2019s been getting five-star reviews. People are . . . I\u2019d say \u201cdumbfounded\u201d would be an accurate term. And even the companies we have OEM deals with are like, \u201cRight on!\u201d You know, we\u2019re not threatening anybody. It\u2019s in its own space. Although [Martin executive chairman] Chris Martin came up to me at the NAMM show this year with this funny-looking grin on his face and said, \u201cI hear we\u2019re competitors now.\u201d [Laughs<\/em>] Yeah, right! Maybe in another 100 years, Chris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fifty years in and you\u2019re still excited. That speaks to the continued vitality of the company.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, we get to work with a lot of talented people, so that keeps us jumping. And our culture is just basically curious. I feel like God gave me a certain talent, and it\u2019s my gift to him to use it up. Whatever\u2019s left, I don\u2019t want to leave a nickel on the table. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Lloyd](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Lloyd_Baggs_AEG-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1\")
![\"Lloyd](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Lloyd_Baggs_Shop_AEG-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1\")
![\"Lloyd](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Lloyd_Baggs_AEG-1_Back.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1\")
![\"Acoustic](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/001_352_Cover-150px.jpg?w=1290&ssl=1\")
<\/a>\n