If Jimi Hendrix were alive today, God bless him, he’d want one of George Gress’s hand-made guitars from Alaska. 

Hendrix, known for playing his beloved Fender Stratocaster, might have thrown his Strat aside for one of Gress’s musical axes.

But there is no question that the late guitar master would have treated one of Gress’s hand-made guitars with the utmost respect.

"I like to make my guitars if I can from local woods,” said Gress, who spent 35 years as an English teacher in Juneau before he retired and started making guitars. He now owns and operates GGressAK, which he operates from a shop at his Juneau home.

Gress’s guitars are all made by hand, using chisels and planes to create the perfect guitar. Gress designs his own guitars and does not use any computer-assisted design work. He loves the feel of the wood as he is making a new guitar.

Gress gigged out as a bass player for more than a quarter-century, and indeed, he met his partner in a band. While he still plays, he has turned his attention to making rather than playing guitars.

The key is to find the right piece of Alaska wood.

"I like to make my guitars from the local woods,” he said. "It’s like fishing. You can’t say when something will happen, but when it does, it’s great. I look for exotic and unusual wood. But all of my guitars are unique.”

Gress rises each morning at 5 a.m. every day to practice his own guitar and build new ones before taking care of his grandchildren. 

"When I practice, I usually tend to go with (Eric) Clapton or B.B. King,” said Gress, who is currently working on perfecting his playing the Nat King Cole standard, "Autumn Leaves.” "Every once in a while, I’ll pull out some Wes Montgomery. I listen to a lot of jazz. I can listen to it, but I can’t play it. 

"I’m a good guitar maker but not a great guitar player.”

Despite his playing limitations, Gress is a virtuoso guitar maker. Like all guitars, Gress’s guitars each have a unique sound that couldn’t be found in another guitar. 

"You pick up a piece of wood, and every last one is different,” he said. "It’s kind of nice. Semi-hollow guitars tend to have a really airy quality which is especially good for jazz, but with a pickup, you can really make them roar.

"I look for unusual textures. With spalted wood, you get black or blue streaks. When I get a piece of wood, I’ve got to work around what they call the exclusions, a hole or a crack that runs through it. You’ve got to find a way to include that feature. Because I pick up the wood wherever I can, I have to expect those imperfections and the challenge is to work around those imperfections.” 

Gress said most of his sales come through word-of-mouth and from an international website, but he did get noticed by one New Jersey native.

"Bon Jovi came to Juneau and played one of my guitars, but that’s as close as we’ve gotten” to selling anything to big-name guitarists, he said.

Still, Gress has built a reputation for guitars so unique, lustrous, and dazzling even if Bon Jovi didn’t buy one. But who plays his guitars is not important to Gress. He makes guitars because he loves to make guitars, pure and simple.

"I really do it for myself,” he said. "Unless I have a special order, I do it for myself. But we figured out this morning that since I started making guitars in 2014, I’ve made one every eleven days. That means you have to have a lot of room in your house.

Others have come to appreciate his work, and some of Gress’s guitars are even displayed like trophies.

"I just send one off to Scotland, and as soon as the package was gone, it’s kind of like sending a kid off to college,” he said. "There’s a sense of loss. But I just go after the next piece of wood and see what’s good for the next one.”

And while, as a guitarist himself, he admires the playing style of The Who’s brilliant rocker Pete Townshend, who also plays a Stratocaster, Gress rues the fact that Townshend used to smash his guitars on stage as an up-and-coming star.

"That breaks my heart,” he said. "I wouldn’t want that to happen to one of my guitars. It’s mostly that I love what I’m doing making guitars, and I hope to continue to do it. I’m lucky that people want to have them.”