Rick Turner (born July 30, 1943) is an American builder of guitars and basses. He co-founded Alembic in 1970 and was involved in the design and construction of the Alembic instruments. He founded Rick Turner Guitars in 1979 and joined Gibson in 1988 where he served as president of Gibson Labs West Coast R&D Division.
Turner left Gibson in 1992 and ran a guitar repair shop at Westwood Music in Los Angeles where he developed piezo pickup designs, working with Jackson Browne, David Crosby and others. He later co-founded Highlander Musical Audio, manufacturer of piezo pickups for acoustic guitars. He continues to design and build guitars for many professional players including Lindsey Buckingham, Ry Cooder, David Lindley, David Crosby and Andy Summers. He is also a regular columnist for Acoustic Guitar magazine and was a former columnist for Bass Player, Frets and Guitar Player magazines. His present company is Renaissance Guitars and he has partnered with Seymour Duncan to form D-TAR.
The Model 1 electric was designed by Turner for use by Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, who continues to use the Model 1 to this day.
He has four children, Ethan, Bret, Shasta, and Elias. Ethan is a successful drummer and has been in various bands on the west coast.
Turner helped engineer the Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound."
He co-founded one of the first boutique guitar companies.
Turner holds the patent on the graphite guitar neck, which he developed in 1976 with Geoff Gould (who then started Modulus Graphite).
He also pioneered the use of curved plates on the front and back of his Model 1 electric guitars in order to reduce standing wave hysteresis loss and the use of 18 volt preamps in an attempt to tame the 'quack' sound commonly associated with piezoelectric acoustic guitar pickups.
Turner teaches "Build a mandolin in four days" courses in the US and Australia and is extremely active on a wide range of musical instrument Internet forums. His style could be seen as "forthright", not suffering fools gladly, and he has been described as being a little like Simon Cowell.