Greg Curbow started out in a workshop on a small farm once owned by his grandmother. He was best known for making sleek, curvaceous electric basses. He opened the Midnight Music Shop in Little Five Points in Atlanta when he was just 23. By keeping his shop open late in the evening to accommodate musicians schedules he began to build built a loyal clientele. In 1988 Greg did some emergency repairs for Jimmy Page when he was passing through Atlanta and was hired as a Jimmy's guitar tech for the rest of the tour.

Later he moved to Morganton and by the mid-1990s, Curbow String Instruments was selling 110 guitars and basses a year. Greg Curbow also designed a widely produced Cort Curbow bass guitar. Greg started to focus on custom instruments made to order turning out only a dozen or less instruments a year selling for thousands of dollars each.

Greg Curbow died in 2005 at the age of 48, of a brain tumor at Peachtree Christian Hospice in Little Five Points.