“Once you’ve discovered you enjoy playing the guitar, you can’t stop playing the guitar.”
In his article “Building the Guitar You’ll Keep” for Wired.com, Chuck Squatriglia offers an excellent glimpse into Richard Hoover and his company, Santa Cruz Guitars.
It’s an unhurried place. Guitars are built one at a time, by hand, a process that takes eight weeks or more. Almost every guitar in the joint is already spoken for, and if you order one today you won’t be playing it until this fall.
I’ve had the opportunity to hear Hoover speak about wood, and I would venture to say that there are few people that know tonewoods as well as Hoover does. The story of his company is, for me, perhaps even more interesting, and Squatriglia does a good job of profiling both Hoover and the company. Hoover clearly has a passion for building high-quality guitars. And, if you’ve ever had the pleasure of playing a Santa Cruz Guitar, you know that Hoover’s passion manifests itself in some of the highest quality guitars made today.
As an added bonus, the article features some excellent photography of the Santa Cruz Guitars shop taken by Jim Merithew.
(Thanks to Darren M. for pointing me to this article.)