Soon after Roger Sadowsky opened his New York City shop in 1979, many of the town’s top session musicians were his customers. One of them was Will Lee, who had come to New York from Miami in 1971 and quickly established a reputation as one of the best studio bass players. “I was doing general repair work: fretwork, re-truing fingerboards, cutting new nuts, shielding, electronics — that kind of stuff,” says Roger. “Will just came in the door one day.” Will is quick to praise Roger’s “uncanny ability” to understand his sometimes-vague requests for maintaining and improving his instruments. “My tech-speak is very limited,” he says, “but with Roger it doesn’t matter, because he’s got such a great way of interpreting what you say.” Roger started to build his own basses in 1982. “At that time, I couldn’t make a creative original instrument and think that any working musician could walk into a jingle session and expect the engineer to deal with it. There was