In the world of boutique bass building, lineage matters. Knowledge is passed from mentor to apprentice, from workshop to workshop, and from one generation of builders to the next. Few contemporary builders embody that tradition more clearly than Wil DeYoung.
Today, DeYoung serves as general manager and oversees the custom shop for Spector, one of the most recognizable bass companies in modern music. And though his path to becoming a builder was buoyed by family tradition, his rise to his current positions was more circuitous. In fact, DeYoung didn’t even start out wanting to build instruments. Long before he found himself guiding Spector’s future, he was a college jazz student searching for a place in music. And before he worked with some of the most respected builders in the industry, he was tinkering with inexpensive instruments on his own to better understand how they worked. “My dad dropped out of college to open a record store,” DeYoung says with a laugh. “I was probably doomed from the start to be obsessed with music.”
Growing up in Michigan, music was a constant presence in the DeYoung household. Records by Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, Larry Carlton, and other artists from the golden era of sophisticated studio musicianship formed the soundtrack of his childhood. Like many aspiring musicians, DeYoung’s first instrument arrived in the form of an inexpensive beginner guitar package that quickly found its way to a corner of the basement, which is surprising considering curiosity and generosity would become the hallmarks of his career.
Picking out woods with a dealer
DeYoung’s formal musical journey began in middle school, not on guitar or bass, but on trombone. Around the same time he joined his school’s band, the church his family attended featured a praise band that needed a bass player. Recognizing their son’s passion for music, DeYoung’s parents bought him a Mexican-made Fender Precision bass. He’d already been plucking his way around a double bass on the side in orchestra and jazz band, but this time, rather than gathering dust, the new instrument became a gamechanger. “I learned a lot on that bass,” he recalls. “It started in church, but then it expanded into every musical opportunity I could find.”
Upon graduating high school, DeYoung enrolled as a music education major at Adrian College before shifting his focus to performance and jazz studies. While saxophone remained his primary instrument academically, bass and guitar steadily became larger parts of his musical identity. He started taking guitar lessons with Professor Dick Lange, and before long, he discovered a well-known truth: Bass players tend to stay busy. “My professors used to tell me, ‘We know you want to be a guitar player, but don’t stop playing bass—every guitar player needs a bass player,’” DeYoung recalls. “That turned out to be absolutely true.”
“The more instruments I worked on, the less it became about my playing and the more it became about what’s possible.”
Wil DeYoung, holding a Spector prototype bass
Yet even as his playing developed, another fascination began to emerge. He wanted to know why instruments felt the way they did. What began as simple curiosity evolved into a hands-on education in repair and modification. DeYoung bought inexpensive instruments, disassembled them, experimented with setups, reshaped necks, and gradually taught himself the fundamentals of guitar construction. “The more instruments I worked on, the less it became about my playing and the more it became about what’s possible,” he says. “I wanted to know how far I could push things.” That curiosity eventually led him into repair work at Guitar Center in Toledo, Ohio, where he spent years developing practical skills—setups, re-frets, acoustic neck resets, bridge repairs, and countless other jobs provided daily education in what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to instrument design.
Perhaps the most important lessons came from the builders who welcomed him into their shops. One of the earliest was Michigan bass builder Matt Kiefer of Better Mousetrap Guitars. At a time when boutique basses were becoming increasingly sophisticated, Kiefer’s instruments represented the modern aesthetic that appealed to DeYoung: multi-laminate necks, exotic woods, extended-range designs, and meticulous craftsmanship.
Equally influential was archtop builder Denny Kopp of Kopp String Instruments in Ohio. Though DeYoung would go on to a career centered around bass-building, his deepest passion remains the archtop jazz guitar. “I’m still obsessed with archtops,” he says. “D’Angelico and D’Aquisto are the pinnacle for me.” Kopp became both mentor and inspiration. During the construction of DeYoung’s own custom archtop, a 17" Betty Swing Archtop, Kopp documented nearly every step of the process, sharing photographs, explanations, and detailed notes. The experience provided a masterclass in craftsmanship and generosity.
“It was incredible,” DeYoung recalls. “He didn’t have to do any of that. He just loved building guitars and loved sharing what he knew.” Watching a single builder transform raw materials into a finished instrument left a profound impression: “I couldn’t help but be hooked at that point.”
The current Spector team (l-r): Colin, Justin, Adam, Drew, Jesse (kneeling), Rob (in back), Fen, Wil, Kris (kneeling), PJ, Christian, Andy (kneeling)
While pursuing graduate studies in jazz guitar, DeYoung knew repair work alone would never satisfy him. He had learned how instruments functioned, how to diagnose problems, and how to improve existing designs. He knew after watching Kopp build him a guitar that what he wanted was to start from scratch. “I’d done enough repair work to understand both the possibilities and the limitations,” he says. “I wanted to see what could happen when you build an instrument from the ground up.” An opportunity to do just that arrived when his future wife, Mia, relocated to New York City. “I figured I’d follow her and see what happened,” DeYoung recalls. “Worst case, I could keep doing repair work, but I knew I wanted to build.”
For a young bassist immersed in jazz, there was one destination that stood above all others: Fodera. Like many players of his generation, DeYoung had spent years listening to artists associated with the company. Victor Wooten, Matt Garrison, Janek Gwizdala, James Genus, Lincoln Goines, Lincoln Schleifer, and Anthony Jackson represented the pinnacle of modern bass playing. Their sounds—and the instruments behind it—had become part of his musical DNA. “That sound was always in my head,” he says. “Why wouldn’t I want to work there?”
The problem was that he had never built a bass professionally. Undeterred, he began calling the company—repeatedly. Over the course of several months, he continued reaching out until persistence finally paid off. “I basically annoyed Laura Fodera into giving me an interview,” he says with a laugh. The interview itself was not what he expected. “I showed up wearing a button-down shirt and khakis, ready for a normal interview.” Instead, he was led directly into the woodshop. “They handed me a bass body and said, ‘You’re going to carve this.’” The practical test functioned more like an audition. Fortunately, it was exactly the kind of challenge DeYoung had spent years preparing for through repair work, experimentation, and self-directed learning.
“I wanted to see what could happen when you build an instrument from the ground up.”
In 2015, he moved to New York City and joined Fodera. Once there, he approached the position with a singular goal: learn everything. “I wanted to understand every part of the build,” he says. “Whether it was my department or not, I wanted to know how it worked.” He stayed late, went in on weekends, and sought opportunities to work in every area of production. Alongside founders Vinny Fodera and Joey Lauricella, builders Aaron Younce and James Michelson became important early mentors. Over time, DeYoung carved necks, routed bodies, installed electronics, fabricated wooden pickup covers and control knobs, performed fretwork, and eventually assumed responsibility for final assembly and setup. For much of his tenure, every bass leaving the shop passed through his hands before reaching its owner.
The role also exposed him to one of the company’s most ambitious technical initiatives: adapting Plek technology to meet the demands of modern electric basses. While Plek systems had originally been developed around acoustic guitars, Fodera’s instruments presented entirely different challenges. Long-scale neck-through basses behaved differently under tension, requiring extensive experimentation and collaboration with the German manufacturer. “We spent a lot of time helping refine what the machine was doing for basses,” DeYoung says. “It taught me a tremendous amount about precision and consistency.”
Years later, when the opportunity emerged to join Spector, DeYoung found himself unexpectedly connected to a much deeper story. The history of Spector and Fodera intersected decades earlier through a woodworking co-op in Brooklyn—Vinny Fodera was Stuart Spector’s first employee. What initially appeared to be a simple career move soon felt more like a continuation of a lineage.
A Woodstock Select bass, launched earlier this year on Spector’s website; solid quilted maple, maple neck, pau ferro fretboard, EMG J pickups, HAZ 9v circuit
At Spector, DeYoung inherited a legacy unlike any other in the bass world. Stuart Spector and Ned Steinberger created one of the most influential bass designs of the 20th century. The elegant and now-iconic NS body shape transformed the way players thought about ergonomics, comfort, and performance. A generation of bassists, including Sting, Doug Wimbish, Eddie Jackson (Queensrÿche), Rachel Bolan (Skid Row), Guy Pratt (Madonna), and Graham Maby (Joe Jackson), embraced the design. Yet honoring a legacy requires more than preserving the past. For DeYoung, the challenge has been balancing heritage with innovation.
“Anything that’s built for 45 or 50 years is going to be built differently and look differently than it did in the beginning,” he asserts. “It’s going to have all these different benchmarks along the way, indicative of different eras. I spent a lot of time with different instruments evaluating what worked and what didn’t. I wanted to build something that really delivered on the original intention of the design but also included the best of everything that Spector has done over 50 years.”
“Being an enabler of people to grow their own skills and think critically about the jobs that they’re doing, so they can improve the instrument, is such a rewarding thing.”
What he noticed right away about the NS-2 was that some important design elements had changed over the years, whether intentionally or not, including the shape of the body, the neck thickness, and overstand of the fretboard to the top of the body. DeYoung took all of that into consideration when he developed a plan centered on having one definitive, idealized 3D model of the 4-string NS-2. He now refers to that bass as the brand’s “North Star.” Everything else—5-string, short scale, and so on—would be based off one standardized design. “I wasn’t designing from the ground up, but the ethos of every tiny detail mattered,” he attests. “Everything had to be reconsidered.”
The other goal for embarking upon what he now dubs his “revision process” was the import business of Spector, which had historically been separate from instruments coming out of the Custom Shop in upstate New York. “Over the years, there were various Spectors—whether they were made in Korea, China, Indonesia, or Europe—that all had their own identity.” Having elements of the Custom Shop’s craftsmanship flow downstream into the international product line and to a wider audience became part of his grand plan. “If you buy a $179 Squier Strat or buy a $20,000 Masterbuilt Strat, and you put those side by side, you see the same design language. It’s still identifiably a Strat. The pickguard is the same shape; the neck carve is essentially the same—all the stuff that makes it a Strat is still there. And that wasn’t necessarily the case with Spector.”
A bass during the sanding process; solid chestnut wings, maple top, rosewood fretboard
DeYoung’s persistence with Korg USA, Spector’s parent company, about disseminating the design language to their international partners, ultimately led to his appointment as general manager, and recently came to fruition with the introduction of the Icon series, based out of Indonesia. “The Icon was designed in the Custom Shop with the same neck profile, the same body curves, it has crown inlays, and the same headstock shape,” he explains. “I made sure that all the 3D drawings that we’re using were the same, just adapted for a bolt-on neck for the [Indonesian] factory in the format that they needed. When you put it side-by-side with a custom-shop build, we want people to recognize the design language but also know what it’s going to feel and sound like. It’s a known thing. The NS-2 is iconic.”
Another one of DeYoung’s first initiatives at Spector was to import the holistic approach to bass building he learned at Fodera. “It felt like such an opportunity to open doors for people," he says. It’s a perspective that harkens back to his time with Denny Kopp. Yes, DeYoung got hooked on building, but it’s also abundantly clear that he adopted the concept of generosity Kopp embodied so thoughtfully throughout that process. “Being an enabler of people to grow their own skills and think critically about the jobs that they’re doing, so they can improve the instrument, is such a rewarding thing."
Though he’s been handed the keys to the proverbial castle, DeYoung clearly understands his role as caretaker of an iconic brand, and remains focused on the same qualities that first drew him into the craft: curiosity, continuous improvement, and a deep respect for the musicians who bring these instruments to life. “My role is to bring in a new perspective and a different way to think about things,” he says. “When it comes to guitar building, there’s no one right way to build a guitar.”
Touring behind their 2025 record From the Pyre, English art-rockers the Last Dinner Party stopped at Nashville’s Pinnacle on June 10. PG’s John Bohlinger met up with the band ahead of the show, where guitarists Emily Roberts and Lizzie Mayland walked him through the key pieces of their road kits. Bassist Georgia Davies suffered an injury before the tour, so her tech Max Lilley was filling in on bass. Brought to you by D’Addario.
As the company celebrates its 50th anniversary, Kramer has introduced the Malina Moye Pacer Deluxe signature model, developed in collaboration with one of guitar’s most distinctive modern players.
Jeff Tweedy, mastermind of legendary alt-rock act Wilco, is a total gear-head—always seeking out another guitar or amp or bass for his massive collection, seemingly hoping each strange and tantalizing toy sparks some form of inspiration. In January 2025, he opened up his treasure trove for aninterview with Reverb, showcasing some of the boutique pieces that have captured his eye and ear. One obvious standout was a Grez Mendocino bass: a lightweight, semi-hollowbody that, with its sharp lipstick pickups, scans as a quirky tribute to the vintage Danelectro aesthetic. “I saw the instrument, [and] it looked austere and interesting,” he says in the video. “I listened to some clips of somebody playing one, and it sounded like something I didn’t have. It’s not like a Danelectro. It’s not like, really, anything.”
That’s basically the creative and business philosophy of Grez Guitars owner/luthier Barry Grzebik, who formed the small but surging company in 2009, operating out of a converted backyard horse barn in Petaluma, California. “I think most of these instruments are pretty versatile, but they’re not infinitely versatile,” he tells Premier Guitar, highlighting his compact line of 4-, 6-, and 12-strings. “I look at it less like ‘Who’s the right player for the instrument?’ A lot of people are. I look at it more like, ‘Who isn’t the right player?’ That’s a smaller group and more easily defined.” He points to the Tweedy-approved Mendocino: “If you’re playing slap-bass, super brash and bright with the treble cranked; if you’re looking for that crazy articulation and a super-fast vibe, these aren’t the instruments for you. Now, if you want something that blooms more interestingly and is a little fatter and richer-sounding, maybe if you’re deciding whether to put flats or rounds on it? [Give me] flat-wounds through a [Ampeg] B-15, and I’m just happy. Whatever that conjures in your mind tonally, that’s the vibe I want to embrace.”
Grzebik with reclaimed old growth redwood ready to be resawn into tops for Mendocino and Grand Tour basses.
Grzebik never set out to build basses at Grez, having initially focused on guitars. Then again, he really couldn’t have pictured any of this organic rise—making his name as a luthier, spinning that name into a brand, getting online shout-outs from world-famous musicians—given that he spent most of his early career in the realm of electronics and pro audio. Early on, he dreamed of being a player—at least until he had a sobering epiphany of sorts.
“I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but I’ve always wanted to play guitar,” Grzebik says, looking back to his childhood. “The idea of being a musician was always fascinating to me, though I was never successful at doing it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not this thing you desire to do. I tried to play guitar as a young kid—maybe I was 8 or 9. My parents rented an acoustic guitar for me, and I went to a community center and took some group lessons. It didn’t stick, and I don’t even know why. And the guitar vanished because it was rented.”
He continues: “It cropped up again when I was 15 or 16—I got an electric guitar and started to learn to play. Then … while I was still in high school, I realized that I wasn’t really a guitar player. I love it, but it’s not for me. How should I put it? They say if you practice enough, you can become great at the guitar. And I know that when I practice, I become better. But I guess I’m also realistic about how much practice it takes me to get better versus someone else. As a kid, I’d run into other people who play guitar at parties and they’d just smoke me. I realized that, although I love it, it’s not what I’m meant to do—I should put my energy into places where I have more natural talent.”
“As a small custom builder, we’re kind of big, but we’re tiny in the grand scheme of things.”
Grand Tour and Mendocino basses in various stages of finishing and buffing.
That area happened to be design. “I was always a mechanical kid,” Grzebik says, recalling how his dad bought him his own toolbox back in the ’70s. “I was fixing my bike, then my buddy’s bike, eventually motorcycles—taking things apart and understanding them.” Those skills dovetailed with music due to his “weird fascination” with hi-fi. “Having a boombox was a new thing, having a stereo,” he says. “When I realized I wasn’t going to make any money playing guitar, I took an electronics class at a local junior college, and the lights just went on: ‘This is amazing. It’s just these parts? There’s not even that many kinds of parts? You put them in a certain order and it does these things?’ All of the sudden, the mystery was gone. It’s like when you learn how a magician does their magic trick. I thought, ‘I can be around guitar and music, but in a different way.’ I feel lucky that I figured that out really early.”
Grzebik experimented a lot—making his own guitar amp, crafting “little battery-powered preamps that you could put in your bass.” By the early ’90s, that obsession led him to work with audio company Apogee, initially designing products like equalizers, amplifiers, and compressors. “That was completely fascinating to me. I was obsessed with that—so much so that I completely stopped playing guitar for a while,” he recalls. “Eventually I was designing loudspeakers. As a junior engineer, you’re not really designing the whole product—the look, the feel, the idea—you’re just given this little thing. ‘Lay out this circuit board.’ ‘Design a power supply.’ ‘We need a heat sink that works better or fits in this spot.’ But as you work your way up the chain, you’re in charge of the whole thing and you’re setting the tone of how a product is going to look and feel and work. So I started to realize that I was a designer. It slowly became more and more the thing I loved to do.”
A Mendocino Bass VI with a reclaimed redwood top and Lindy Fralin noiseless alnico P-90s, in a burst finish.
Around this time, a theme had clearly emerged: Grzebik was an adaptable worker and a creative thinker, willing to go where the road happened to lead. Soon enough, Apogee noticed his customer service skills and started sending him into the field, where he traveled all over the world to oversee installations for major events like the Oscars and the Grammys. “If you spent $100,000 or $200,000 for a sound system for your venue or touring rig, you might expect someone from the company to show up and hand-hold you through the installation—show you what it does, how to tune it,” he says. “That took me away from guitar, but it was so fascinating and exciting.”
“I look at it less like ‘Who’s the right player for the instrument?’ and more like, ‘Who isn’t the right player?’”
After a while, Grzebik realized he could do this kind of thing on his own: “Having been director of engineering for Apogee Sound for a long time, I had a few contacts, and people would call and hire me. I would work as a consultant, and I still do a little bit—designing recording studios here and there. But I realized after a few years that I kind of missed designing products.”
In 2008, he devised an acoustic guitar amp for a small startup, but when the economy tanked, the whole thing unraveled. There was a silver living, though. “That product forced me to drag the guitars I hadn’t used in a decade out of the closet,” he says. “And once they were out of the closet, I didn’t put them back. Then the idea started to creep in: ‘I could probably design a guitar. I know about guitars and woodworking and cabinetry and electronics and sound.’ I would have never thought, when I was in my 20s trying to become a product engineer, that I would be a guitar builder for a living. It didn’t even cross my mind at the time, but it just sort of morphed into it.”
A Grand Tour 5-string fretless bass with a natural spruce top and Curtis Novak H22 pickups.
Flash forward to 2026, and Grez is one of the most reputable brands in the custom-guitar space, selling everything from Junior models to baritones, even a Mendocino Bass VI. The company produces somewhere around 100 instruments each year—about two per week—with 40 percent of sales going to dealers and 60 percent direct to customers, plus custom orders on request. “I have the ability to maybe do 150 in the facility I have, and then that’s it,” Grzebik notes. “And by ‘facility,’ what I really mean is ‘horse barn in the backyard.’ Once we get to about 150 a year, which is a place I slowly envision getting to, that’s it. We don’t make more than that. The goal isn’t necessarily to be giant. It’s just me and a few helpers, and we’re enjoying ourselves as best we can making a living. As a small custom builder, we’re kind of big, but we’re tiny in the grand scheme of things.”
“I’m trying to make racehorses that you go out and race.”
For their bass models, the ratio is way different: almost 90 percent direct. But Grzebik isn’t too analytical about that divergence—it’s all been “morphing” slowly, as he moved from semi-hollows and archtop hollowbody guitars into the occasional 4-string. “It was this tiny little growth curve [for bass],” he says. “I made one, and then I made another, and then a few more. It was a slow-motion kind of growth.” Given how labor-intensive the instruments are, he eventually settled into the staple Mendocino model—first as a guitar, then a baritone, then the Bass VI, then the short-scale bass. “Some of it sold well because there’s not a lot of what I’m doing out there,” he continues. “Admittedly, I make weird stuff. I’m not making copies of Fenders. The Mendocino short-scale bass is conceptually based on the Danelectro short-horn bass—it’s a nod to that at its core. It’s a super niche instrument, and you’re only going to sell so many. But as a tiny company, I don’t need to sell that many. I can make these weird things, and if I sell a dozen of this weird model and a dozen of that weird model, all of the sudden I’m making a living.”
Grzebik sands inside the f-holes on a Grand Tour bass in preparation for paint.
Part of that sustainability boils down to resourcefulness. Using as much reclaimed wood as possible, Grzebik maximizes every piece he has: “Because of my manufacturing background, I’m fairly good at keeping common materials. If I have a chunk of Honduran mahogany as a body blank, one piece in stock, that can be used for almost any model I make.” But it also comes back around to the uniqueness of his instruments, which continue to intrigue players like Tweedy, Ian Martin Allison, and Allman Betts Band bassist Justin Corgan. (The latter, Grzebik notes, recently hit the road with a Grez Grand Tour: a 16", semi-hollow double-cutaway model.)
“The people who are into bass, when they look up onstage and don’t quite know what the guy is playing, that really piques their interest,” Grzebik says. “They get a lot of people coming up post-show asking about the instrument. The reality is that most people don’t know Grez. When they look up there and see this thing, they’re asking about it all the time. I think [bassists], most of the time, are getting more attention than they’re used to.”
It all ties back to the Grez ethos: crafting eye-catching objects that are built to be played, not simply admired. “I’m not trying to make show ponies,” Grzebik says with a smile. “I’m trying to make racehorses that you go out and race.”
