About the Hideout
The Origin Story
Paul's Guitar Hideout didn't really start as a business idea. It came out of everything that was already there.
Music was there early. Peter Gabriel's So on car rides. Ozzy. Judas Priest. Records I didn't just like. They felt important to me before I could have explained why.
I met Travis in 1999, when I was 12, through his brother. We started playing guitar together, making up songs, and eventually forming bands. It never really stopped.
By high school we were playing around the Capital Region and getting opportunities that seemed pretty impossible at the time. We opened for bands like Breaking Benjamin, Hawthorne Heights, Bayside, and The Presidents of the United States of America. Our band was called Horse in a Box. Neither of us came up with the name.
After high school we formed The Loyalty and got much more serious about songwriting. We won a listener contest on WEQX, played with The Strokes in Albany on the First Impressions of Earth tour, and got close to a few record deals that ultimately didn't happen.
So I kept going.
I got deeper into engineering and producing, kept writing and releasing music as Pillowhead, and eventually moved into mastering with New York Mastering Co. One thing kept turning into the next.
Paul's Guitar Hideout came out of that same world.
I wanted a place with great guitars, repairs, lessons, records, and the kind of stuff I'd actually want around me.
The shop ended up inside The Shirt Factory in Glens Falls, a 1902 shirt mill now filled with artists, craftspeople, independent businesses, and people making things for a living. A guitar shop made sense there.
And Travis is part of it too.
More than twenty-five years after we first started playing together, after bands, records, different jobs, and different paths, we somehow ended up back in the same place, still surrounded by guitars, still making things.
That's the Hideout.
Just the next place the music led.
I still write, record, engineer, produce, and master music. At home, I live with my best pal Riley, an American Staffordshire Terrier adopted through Lucky Puppy in Argyle, NY.
What We're Here For
I want Paul's Guitar Hideout to help build a real guitar community around Glens Falls.
A guitar shop can be more than a place to buy something. It can be where you take your first lesson, meet other musicians, find the guitar that makes you want to play every day, or bring in your dad's old six-string and hear it come back to life.
It can be where you finally get an instrument playing exactly the way you always wanted it to, where a beginner realizes they can actually do this, or where somebody who stopped playing years ago finds a reason to start again.
That stuff matters to me.
Music gave me a way to find my own voice, meet people I formed lifelong bonds with, and follow ideas far enough that they changed the course of my life. That possibility is still a big part of what I love about it.
You can pick up a guitar because you like how it looks, and five years later you're writing songs, starting a band, making records, and doing something you never imagined when you started.
Guitar shops are one of the places where there's magic right beneath the surface.
That's what I want the Hideout to be: a place to learn, dream, tinker, connect, and see where the music takes you.
Paul's Guitar Hideout is located at The Shirt Factory in Glens Falls, NY. Use the Cooper Street entrance and take the stairs up. If stairs are difficult or you're bringing in something you don't want to carry up, call or text us and we'll arrange access.
The Shirt Factory
71 Lawrence St., Suite 201B, 2nd Floor
Glens Falls, NY 12801
Wednesday–Sunday, 12–5 PM
(518) 217-8695 · info@paulsguitarhideout.com