I'm Richard.
This is our shop.

I started fixing guitars because I couldn't afford to buy good ones. The cheap ones I could afford always fought back — high action, buzzing frets, tuning that drifted by the second song — so I learned to set them up myself. Somewhere in there I realized the fixing was the part I actually loved.

That was a long time ago now. Since then I've worked on a lot of instruments: student guitars that just needed a proper setup, road-worn workhorses, and a few pieces old enough and rare enough that I sat with them a while before picking up a tool. The last group taught me the most, mostly by teaching me when to keep my hands still.

Eventually there was more work than one person could do without cutting corners, so I brought on a few repairers I trust — people who'd rather do a job slowly and right than quickly and twice. I trained them on the way we work, and every instrument still gets looked at against the same standard, whether it's my hands on it or theirs.

The thing we care about is simple. An instrument has a voice, and usually the owner already loves it. Our job isn't to make it into a different instrument. It's to clear away whatever is getting in the way of the one you have — and then stop.

That's also why I built the listening tools we use. I got tired of chasing buzzes by feel and second-guessing whether a repair had actually helped. Measuring it settled the argument, and it keeps the whole bench honest — it gives us a way to prove, to you and to ourselves, that the instrument left better than it came in.