In 1966 a young Richard Hoover got the notion that he could somehow improve the tone of his old Harmony guitar by fiddling around with its insides. So he took it apart and, more importantly, managed to get it back together. His first attempt at guitar surgery didn’t make his Harmony sound better, but it instilled in him the desire to build his own guitars.

Hoover learned many useful techniques and gained experience with a variety of tools, but his growing skills didn’t bring him any closer to his goal. Instead, he decided to channel his energy into becoming a better guitar player. When he moved to Santa Cruz in 1972, he intended to become a guitar player, not a guitar maker. But when his guitar was stolen, everything changed.

“I had a nice Martin D-28 and somebody took it,” Hoover says, without rancor and with more than a little glee, realizing the thief had done him a favor. Hoover had never given up his dream of becoming a luthier, and that long-ago misdeed led directly to his founding of the Santa Cruz Guitar Company, which now builds some of the world’s finest steel-string guitars.

Richard Hoover is a compact, energetic man with a brown beard that is starting to show streaks of white. He laughs easily, particularly when he ruminates about the absurdities of the music industry, but when he talks about the guitars that he and his crew build, he is deadly serious. The area around his desk is littered with curious bits of instrumental detritus, including the carcass of a Portuguese viola de arame, samples of tonewoods, unfinished necks, and half-shaped bridges. As he sits, he fidgets with his pen, changing his grip on it as if he were grasping a chisel, a small saw, and a screwdriver.

By 1976 Richard Hoover had become a well-known figure in Santa Cruz’s growing music scene. That year two repairmen from Union Grove Music, Bruce Ross, and William Davis, approached Hoover with an offer to invest in his small business, and in exchange, he would teach them to build guitars. Hoover was amenable to the idea. Since their investment was quickly spent on wood, tools, and rent, they found an attorney who was a guitarist and was willing to do the partnership’s legal work in exchange for their first guitar.