Greetings to all,
My name is Mick Donner. I joined the ranks here at Guitar Repair of Tampa Bay a little over a month ago when we were still headquartered at Legends Guitars.
For those of you who don't already know me, I've been repairing and building instruments for about 30 years. In 1986, I joined the service department at Washburn where I designed the Washburn AB-40 and AB-20 acoustic bass guitars. I left Washburn in 1989 to take a job at Gibson for the next year. I worked at Peavey in Guitar R&D from 1990 to 1994 designing instruments and building artist guitars. I was involved in the design, building and development of the Midibase, Cyberbass, B Quad basses, and Cirrus basses as well as building personal instruments for several high-profile endorsees. In 1994 I became product manager for the guitar division at Peavey. I left Peavey in 1996 to become production manager for Parker Guitars. Ken was kind enough to let me help with the development of the Parker Fly Bass.
As Parker's fortunes worsened, I was downsized and was lucky enough to land the post at Dean guitars that Ben Chafin had just vacated. I was at Dean until June of 2006 when I struck out on my own working as a consultant to the Music Products Industry providing sourcing, design, artist relations, and technical writing services.
That sort of business is predicated on smaller companies having the resources to expand their business. The recession took care of that so I went back to playing, teaching and repair work.
Ben called me a couple of months ago just to catch up. I told him I was doing repair work in my garage so he asked if I'd like to join him in the shop at Legends. The rest is history.
I'm happy to be part of the Guitar Repair of Tampa Bay team. Ben and I seem to work well together and I look forward to serving the local community of professional and amateur musicians.
