San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
GOLDEN STATE
The first thing that greets me as I walk into Santa Cruz Guitar Co. is a life-size cardboard cutout of a smiling Richard Hoover, the company’s founder. The second thing is the real smiling Richard Hoover, holding out a box of doughnuts.
“That one’s covered in health-food crumbs,” he says, pointing to the one my gaze had fallen on.
The 42-year-old guitar company, famed for its boutique acoustic guitars, welcomes visitors for tours, which Hoover leads himself (doughnuts not guaranteed). He closes his eyes when talking about his personal journey to becoming a master luthier, the preferred term for a maker of string instruments, but his eyes pop open brightly when he tells a selfdeprecating joke.
He asks how long I’ve played guitar. Twenty-five years, I tell him. Hoover beats that by several decades. “Then why aren’t we better?” he asks with an impish grin.
Hoover has a good excuse: He’s spent his years perfecting the art of building guitars, not playing them. Pictures on the wall of Tony Rice, Norman Blake and Brad Paisley hint at how Santa Cruz gained its reputation. When the acoustic guitar started becoming more of a lead instrument in bluegrass and country in the ’70s, players wanted to customize their guitars not just for aesthetics, but for tone. Hoover, who learned to build guitars following the tradition of fine violin makers, tuning each instrument for maximum resonance and customizing tone to a player’s style, was the man to turn to.
A bluesy melody floats across the factory from a guitar in its final stages of being built for a finger-style jazz player.
“First words,” Hoover says, with the look of a proud father.
Santa Cruz may not fit into the typical geographies of bluegrass or jazz, but it was the perfect setting for Hoover’s workshop.
“Santa Cruz is artistic, quirky, diverse and tolerant,” Hoover says. “It’s been that way not just since the ’60s, but since the 1860s. Some places are just a vortex for that creative spirit.”
That vortex apparently encompasses
the entire California coast, which is studded with guitar makers ranging from some of the largest guitar manufacturers in the world to a growing community of small luthiers. California has more than twice as many guitar makers as any other state, according to research from industry tracker IbisWorld. That’s good news for guitar players, woodworkers or anyone who’s simply curious to see how things are made, because many of these guitar makers are happy to show you their craft up close, from the traditional art to how California continues to shape the way the world sees and plays guitars.
How did California become the guitar capital of the U.S.? Andy Powers, master guitar designer at Taylor Guitars, points to Southern California.
“It’s always been a hotbed of the nation’s culture, from fashion to architecture to television and movies,” Powers says. “We have a culture that values new ideas, freethinking artists and people developing new technologies.”
New technologies are certainly evident on the tour of Taylor’s factory in El Cajon, east of San Diego. To mass-produce high-quality acoustic guitars in the U.S., Taylor workers had to design their own tools to make that possible. Robotic arms maneuver guitar bodies as they’re spray finished and then cured in ultraviolet light ovens. Another robot arm swings in to buff the guitars to a high shine.
The robotic-arm era of guitar making might never have happened without one key invention that emerged out of Southern California in the 1930s: the electric guitar. George Beauchamp, co-founder of National String Instrument Corp., spent his evenings tinkering with electronics on his dining room table looking for new ways to make the guitar loud enough to hold its own in bands. His first working prototype became the basis for Rickenbacker electric guitars, later made famous by George Harrison and John Lennon, and frequently smashed to bits by Pete Townshend.
It took Leo Fender, a radio repairman and inventor from Fullerton (Orange County), to provide the spark that made the electric guitar and bass explode onto the global music scene