Rick Turner started repairing, restoring,and building stringed instruments while still at high school in the early 1960s. He started as an apprentice luthier in Boston in 1963, played guitar professionally for several years, before co-founding Alembic in 1970. Turner was involved in the design and construction of the Alembic instruments and later invented and patented the graphite neck in 1976, with Geoff Gould who then started Modulus Graphite. He founded Rick Turner Guitars in 1979 and joined Gibson in 1988 where he served as president of Gibson Labs West Coast R&D Division.

Turner left Gibson in 1992 and ran a guitar repair shop at Westwood Music in Los Angeles where he developed piezo pickup designs, working with Jackson Browne, David Crosby and others. He later co-founded Highlander Musical Audio, manufacturer of piezo pickups for acoustic guitars.Turner used 18v preamps in an attempt to tame the 'quack' sound commonly associated with piezoelectric acoustic guitar pickups.

He continues to design and build guitars for many professional players such as Lindsey Buckingham, Ry Cooder, David Lindley, David Crosby and Andy Summers. He is also a regular columnist for Acoustic Guitar and a former columnist for Bass Player, Frets and Guitar Player magazines. His present company is Renaissance Guitars and he has partnered with Seymour Duncan to form D-TAR.

The Model 1 electric was designed by Turner for use by Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, who continues to use the model 1 to this day.Turner used curved plates on the front and back of his Model 1 electric guitars in order to reduce standing wave hysteresis loss.