Meet Josh Maxey | Musician, Guitar Teacher, Maxey Archtops, Phish Guitar Heads

We had the good fortune of connecting with Josh Maxey and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Josh, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
What was your thought process behind starting your own business?

Being a musician is being a small business. I knew when I was finishing up music school that it would take the same type of practice and creativity to build a life with the guitar as it takes to play and write music. I began my teaching business while finishing my last year of music school in 2003. I was in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and within a short time had a full schedule based on my advertising and teaming with a local music shop to reach people looking for lessons in our neighborhood.

I have a series of 12+ albums. Celebration of Soul was my first to be on a Jazz Label (Miles High Records) and be played around the world on jazz fm radio. It has always helped me to approach my music in larger scale format. I really like the idea of one album relating to and leading into the next, and as I am working on the music, I have an arc in mind and themes that I can draw from over the series of recordings. I’ve recently begun a new project here in Denver with a collaborative trio with a wonderful drummer and bassist. We are wrapping up our fist release with more material already set for our follow up.

Over the last year my guitar making company, Maxey Archtops, has begun to grow and take off! We introduced a new line of guitars with a focus on small body archtop and hollow body guitars. I have two partners and we have been able to build up to a successful launch of our latest model, the Maxey Archtops GH3. We sold out our first batch in pre orders! The thought process behind starting and building MA is such a joy! We are able to focus on the type of guitars we want to see made, that our music community is interested in, and provide something new and different at an accessible price point. It’s exciting to see a guitar go from an idea to a beautiful high end instrument!

Lastly, I run a guitar community online that is unlike any other. I started Phish Guitar Heads in February of 2019. The group is based on FaceBook and we have a new website that continues the discussion. The group focuses on learning and supporting each other’s work on the guitar. There’s no doubt that Phish and their guitar player, Trey Anastasio is how we all find each other in the community, but the real focus of PGH is our members telling their own stories. I have approached running the group as a kind of extension of the atmosphere of my lessons and I am constantly amazed at the amount and level of expertise that is shared there freely on a daily basis. There is a constant flow of hard won insights. I always encourage our members to share what they know, because that thing might just be a missing piece for someone else to take their own next steps musically.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I applaud anyone making a life in music! I know it isn’t easy and takes a near constant drive to play the next note, write the next song, create the next guitar, teach the next lesson and continue to connect with people.

I am proud of the people I do guitar lessons with. I have the absolute gift and pleasure of seeing people set goals, work hard and learn more every week. It’s a constant source of inspiration and keeps me doing the same. I am also very proud of the Maxey Archtops line of guitars. We are able to add to the conversation in our music community and create models that combine the quality level, wood work, specifications, playability, tone and sound in a new way.

There have been too many lessons along the way to count! On the business side of being a guitar teacher, scheduling is one of the most important aspects. I am careful to give a short break between each online lesson. This gives me a few minutes to take a breath and prepare for the next session. I teach a lot of online lessons with people around the country (and sometimes world), so making sure the online format works well for me and the other person is important. I write out lessons and create videos of examples during the sessions for reference. It helps me to have a few central themes that frame the lessons. I always keep in mind a balance of four essential topics: Songs, Technique, Theory and Creative. I make sure that we are building each of those topics one week at a time and as we step back month to month we can see how all the effort adds up to progress over time. My first jazz guitar teacher in VA stressed the importance of having a method and this idea of having principles to approach these four topics keeps me on track as a practicing musician and as a teacher helping others with guitar.

I am proud of the Phish Guitar Heads community. Much like my guitar lessons, I get to see the very best of people interacting with each other and learning from each other. It’s beautiful! Truly. One lesson for me has been understanding not everyone is online or in a community like ours to give or support. At times there have been difficult moments managing personalities and knowing when to shut the door on further communication has been important. Fortunately, these challenges that need to be addressed account for a very small percentage of the tens of thousands of interactions in our group, or that I have personally. These moments have helped me to better understand who I am, as well, and have helped me to clarify what I find most important in connecting with people. Music, to me, is the most direct link to the foundational experience of what it is to be human. It takes the many ups and downs of life and reflects them back to us as beauty that we can recognize ourselves in. That is what is most important in our PGH community. We are here taking a little bit of that beauty in together and playing our own music in response. #ICallDogLog

As far as the idea of my art. I think the underlying creativity of playing music, practicing music, teaching guitar, running a learning based community, and making a line of guitars is the same. In each instance there are a million decisions that are needed to keep growing and the overall story of where they are going keeps the step by step work heading the right way. I focus a lot on goals. In the case of teaching, it’s easy. I want to support and facilitate as best as possible the growth of the person’s musical journey. It’s so easy to see the best in the people I work with and I just want to be able to help them open the doors they would like on the guitar. The focus is on them enjoying music more and more and becoming the musician they want to be. I know for myself we are maybe the last to see our own growth, but as a teacher I get a front row seat to see people improving areas they work at all the time and it is amazing.

I think the same creativity that goes into playing music goes into teaching and making instruments. In the case of guitars, an idea becomes a solid object that is both its own art and more importantly will lead to the player creating more music! I think about all the notes and songs being played on Maxey Archtop guitars as they go out into the world! I am somewhat in awe that these instruments each begin as an idea, or an ah-ha moment. Next comes detailed design plans, wood choices, and then the design is off to our luthier teams which take these ideas and turn them into world class instruments. Maxey Archtops focuses on a particular niche that is a crossover of genres. We want the clarity of tone and notes that arch top jazz guitars have beautifully produced historically. The smaller size and construction type of our guitars makes it possible to add volume and drive and these guitars that have complex acoustic properties just roar to life! You can play the most subtle and nuanced sounds and also blow the doors off whatever room you need to. I keep in mind that a guitar is also a companion of sorts for us musicians. We develop a relationship and understand how the guitar responds to our playing. The fact that the guitar is a medium for our personal expression and as an object is inspiring to be picked up and played is top of mind for me with each of our models.

Lastly, I am proud of my body of work on record and in guitar lessons. One of the things I value the most in my favorite musicians, John Coltrane, Trey Anastasio, Beatles, Miles, the Grateful Dead, and others is how they have always pushed along to the next creative expression, never staying too long in one place. I’m happy with how each of the main output periods for my albums have had a unified theme, stringing together multiple albums over a couple years to give an accurate picture for that time of who was making the music. I think I understand my favorite musicians better through this lens. I see how I am not who I was 10, or 20 years ago and that was probably similar for them. The music both mirrors back what I find important in the music and frames the stages I’ve been through personally giving those times meaning and a form that I can see changed and developed over the years.

I have a wonderful time teaching guitar and am proud thinking of all lessons and classes I’ve done. In 2020 I began a series of online group classes with my Guitar Heads School. I get to pick a topic that fits my music community’s needs and craft 3, 5 or 8 lessons over the course of a month or two that custom fits the needs of the group I’m working with. I can get into the details of learning about how the layout of scales and information on the fretboard works, spend weeks discussing the physical techniques to develop to play more expressively, talk about the symmetry and beauty of how music theory works, focus on movements that when repeated help us to get better at playing the guitar and dive as deep as we can into improvisation topics.

Over all I think of myself as an improvisor and someone that values having a method and system across my teaching, guitar making company, my original music and as a part of a music community. The thing that helps me the most is having a sense of purpose for each of the main things I do and I am endlessly engaged with the creative energy. To me, the goal is already real. There is a truly blurry line between the initial creative impulse and the result.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Red Rocks is essential! Find a band you like and go! The yearly Phish shows at Dicks are wonderful as well.

My favorite places in Colorado are some of the obvious ones, like Pikes Peak, Garden of the Gods and Estes Park. Rocky Mountain National Park is amazing and our family trips to mountain towns like Vail or FairPlay have been wonderful. For shops, I like Monkton Guitars, Old Town Pickin’ Parlor, Flipside Music and for guitar repairs German Guitars. Favorite Pizza near by me is Serafini’s Pizzeria in Brighton and I really love Rio Grande for green chili chicken burrito and Wild Pastures for burgers, both in Boulder.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My wife Jessica, daughter Mayu and my father, Steve Maxey are first! My mother, Debra Maxey is always in my heart and on my mind.

Jessica also runs a small business, Jessica’s Dog Training. She is a one lady show!!!! We often have Board and Train dogs joining our family pack. I’ve watched her work with hundreds of clients over the years and I love seeing how happy her clients are with the training. She makes a difference in the dog’s and owner’s lives and is able to do so running her own business, setting her own hours, focusing on the type of work she wants and I watch her constantly looking into new techniques and exercises to keep getting better and better results with each dog. Jessica is also a musician, her latest album is called Walk In Harmony and she has just started writing for a new album we plan to work on this year. I endlessly admire how she always keeps pushing forward. The albums we have recorded together have won awards and one of our songs is featured on the Putumayo release Native America.

I love watching our daughter build up her YouTube channel. She makes animated shorts and is constantly working on art and her next video. Digital art is not my area of expertise! I watch her using editing programs like a pro, quickly getting the exact expression tools she wants and carefully shading colors or developing an idea for a character. It’s so cool to watch! She is also making what she imagines and putting it out in the world. She is an endless source of love and a reminder that we are all here doing our best and being ourselves.

My father has always been an entrepreneur. He has started multiple businesses. He currently has a GPS tracker called MaxTracker that is being manufactured locally in Boulder, CO. The business is based on Amazon. Over the years he has created companies on a wide range of topics, from based on being an eBay business working with big box retailers to being one of the fist auto financing companies online in the early 2000s. Watching him have an idea, then put in a tremendous amount of work to build it into a business has been amazing. One of the things I most appreciate is how he is able to work with others to make each project work, he is able to bring people into the ideas and create a team to accomplish the work. He always keeps going, and does not give up.

My mother passed away ten years ago but she is always a part of my life. She was a creative writer, first. She wrote short stories and many poems. She was also very spontaneous! Maybe my ease with improvising is from her. She wrote one of the fist books about ADD in the early 80’s (HADD Enough) that I can still find reference to online. She also began a support group that organized hundreds of teachers and parents locally in VA when I was a kid. She was the first person to stand and say, “this is what is going on” and she reached thousands of people up to meeting with the Governor of VA at the time to discuss her work. That’s pretty creative! She pushed back at any idea of problem kids and was at the forefront of pointing out that in many cases these kids are brighter and more creative than their peers and should be treated as such.

Website: JoshMaxey.com, MaxeyArchtops.com and https://www.facebook.com/groups/phishguitarheads

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshuamaxey/?hl=en and https://www.instagram.com/maxeyarchtops/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joshuamaxey

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MaxeyArchtops

Other: MaxeyArchotps.com

PhishGuitarHeads.com