The resonance of craftsmanship.

Authenticity has become a design buzzword in the past ten years borrowing on the old notion that handmade, bespoke products are reflections of superiority, sincerity and sublime character. As if to say that real quality is something different than fake quality, and that if you can make people think it’s made by hand, it’s top shelf. To some degree this is true. This got its start with craft beers, coffee, and organic products usually seen on Portlandia. Truth is in the late 80’s, ad man Hal Riney was writing print campaigns and voicing TV ads for Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve Beer claiming “brewed in Oregon in the old-fashioned, traditional way.” Designed with a gold engraved label and neck band and storytelling text, this beer bottle said authentic all over. Somewhere between a cigar band and a land deed certificate, it spoke a language that Budweiser, Coors and even Heineken didn’t speak. Riney carried that same sensibility into dozens of homespun, entertaining, and very funny broadcast commercials. Thus the age of handmade—or at least selling handmade—was born.

With the exception of the occasional fly rod and small batch honey, marketing and design today has hijacked the credibility of what is nearly vanished from our consumer culture—craftsmanship. This is the original digital art—products made with ten digits, with love and patience, one-at-a-time. When you hear the word ‘genuine’ today, there is ample cause for suspicion. Except for the Santa Cruz Guitar Company.

Richard Hoover started Santa Cruz Guitars in Santa Cruz, California in 1976 to fill a niche that he thought was on its way out. That is, guitars that were made by hand that sounded and played like they were made especially for each owner. And that is exactly what he and his 18 full-time luthiers do to this very day. His company is named after the hippy beach town where musicians and artisans can intersect and enjoying a lifestyle that nurtures the old world practices of violin makers. Every Santa Cruz employee plays the guitar and knows what makes an exceptional instrument—and how to make it. Their customers know too—players like Eric Clapton, Tony Rice, Brad Paisley, Janice Ian, and Don Edwards to name just a handful.

Richard is perfectly happy making 500 plus guitars a year—because the alternative would go against everything he built his company for. Whereas their competitors have factories that have mechanized nearly every function in making a guitar in order to meet mass market demands, Santa Cruz has remained a small shop and makes their custom guitars one-at-a-time. Every single guitar sounds unique because of the choice of wood and the way it is constructed. Their guitars are born with a particular sound that they hear in the soundboard long before it even resembles a guitar. Call it its DNA. Thus their interest and expertise is in doing everything possible to maintain and promote the inherent voice of that first piece of wood.

Each guitar goes through a hundred steps in production, all on benches in a humidity-controlled environment. Like a woodworker’s dream, the shop doesn’t look a lot different than a custom furniture maker’s, with the exception of dozens of custom-made jigs, clamping and gluing apparatus. The precision imbued in their guitars is no different than a finely milled race car engine—except they are by hand. Perfection is the only option. Any intolerance in building—at any stage—shows up in the final tone and playability of the instrument. Shortcuts are the enemy at Santa Cruz.

The design and building of each of their several models is a product of striving for that perfect look, touch, and resonant sound. Though there is nothing proprietary about the basic design of a guitar, any one of their guitars holds a hundred trade secrets that are baked in along the way.

As attentive as Santa Cruz is to the sound of their guitars is their attention to its appearance. Years of prototyping and refining have rendered a line of guitars that are stunningly beautiful to look at, hold, and play. The hands of their luthiers have touched every joint and surface hundreds of times and left an ingrained glow that transcends and carries forward their core design aesthetic. When a player lays a hand on the fretboard or glides over the curves of the body, they are feeling beauty and pure love. Every brand new guitar seems to come with an old soul.

This is what it means to make things by hand. It is not only the physicality of the operation, but the time, patience, and intention that gets paid forward to the product—then to the consumer. This is genuine authenticity and never has to be boasted in an ad or a slogan—it simply is.

Called ‘tap tuning’, Adam listens for the wood’s inherent harmonics before shaping the soundboard’s bracing to achieve it’s best acoustics.