Baranik Guitars

Mike Baranik came to guitar building the long way around. Born in California and raised in New Jersey, he moved to Los Angeles as a teenager chasing a career as a player, realized the odds, and discovered — to his surprise — that guitars were things a person could actually build by hand. He enrolled at the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery in Phoenix in 1993, stayed on as an apprentice and then an assistant instructor under John Reuter, and learned acoustic flat-top making at the Phoenix Guitar Company alongside his friend Kent Hamblin. In 1997 he brought his first two flat-tops to an acoustic festival in California — Jim Olson was there demonstrating his methods — got encouraging feedback from the luthiers he admired, and decided on the spot to build for a living. A top-flight reputation, and a long order waitlist, followed quickly; in 2006 he moved the shop to California, where he works today in Templeton. Baranik's acoustics are small-body steel-strings built for expressive players: the Retreux parlor, the Meridian concert, and a 00/OM, voiced for responsiveness, balance, and dynamic sensitivity rather than sheer volume. Around 2012, after more than a decade of acoustic-only work, he circled back to the solidbody electrics he'd started on as a young builder — original designs inspired by the quirky Japanese and Italian guitars of the 1960s, reworked for modern playability — and that line has since earned its own following among working session and touring guitarists. Running both, he says, brought the excitement back into building. On the Atlas you'll find the acoustic half of that work: the unhurried, individually built flat-tops that made his name.