A conversation with Richard Hoover

So your production is kept low to maintain quality.

You can assure quality in that approach, rather than by numbers. It is not the elusive perfection because no one can really expect to attain that, but really the pursuit of ultra high quality not only in fit, finish and materials but also in the way a guitar sounds. What you get is a really sophisticated instrument and that’s not the nature of larger companies or even some individual builders.

When you’re talking about a larger company, are they not able to access the highest quality woods due to the fact that they buy in such a large quantity?

The larger companies would have some stringent quality control of the wood, but it is heavily weighted toward the cosmetic. To evaluate wood for tonal potential and more so to work it to get the best tonal potential, sustain and balance you wish to get out of the instrument is a different story all together. Our reclaimed sustainable yields are responsibly harvested woods that are in limited supply. I am very cautious not to insult larger companies because they really have a service to offer as not everybody wants, needs nor can spend $3000 - $5000 and up on an instrument. Using old woods because they sound better is a really important part of what we are doing and no, it is not easy to come by. We have a reputation built on 30 years for being a very green company and we want old wood, so people come to us with it. A larger company may do something like that for the marketing appeal for being ecologically responsible or conservationist by doing a limited edition, but our style is to do it all the time, every time.

What is the most important aspect of building a guitar?

Let’s focus on the sound of the guitar: it would be treating materials individually and varying the dimensions of said materials to maintain consistency of sound.  Some of that information is available as a body of knowledge for hundreds of years through violin building; some of it is more recent in the study of acoustic physics some of it is breakthroughs from the late 1800’s in acoustic physics. All the information is there, but to be able to put it to use and collect it in one spot as it is in Santa Cruz is kind of the perfect storm. It is really great to have access to all of that information and also the desire to do it and the wherewithal. We really did develop- if not invent- the boutique guitar concept and it is viable in the industry now. When we began it wasn’t, and it was really difficult to sell a guitar if someone didn’t know the name, or didn’t know the materials and didn’t understand the concept.  Three decades later, it is not only accepted, but it is understood and really appreciated in the business.

What is your impression of the boutiques builders who are growing in popularity like, Goodall or Olsen?

Goodall and Olsen are actually good friends of mine and we have had a great symbiosis in sharing information over years. In fact, the state of the acoustic guitar at this point is due to the sharing of information between the builders who are out there in the market place right now. Not withholding secrets as in the Master to Apprentice guild system that has been in Europe for a zillion years, the sum being much greater than the parts due to a lot of great brains working on it.  I think my legacy in all this is there is a Santa Cruz style of building which does not include the people we just talked about because their simultaneous discovery and their own development. Many of the biggest names in individual Luthery I would say right now are alumni of the Santa Cruz Guitar Company.

Are there any of those alumni you care to comment on?

Jeff Traugott is masterful at what he does and I am extremely proud and I am also proud of where he has taken the acoustic guitar. He by no means makes a Santa Cruz style guitar; he has his own statement to make and his own methodology combined with some real God given talents and some great experience in building.  He does have the Santa Cruz influence, but I don’t consider it my fault that he does such a good job!

What is the Santa Cruz Style of guitar making?

It is the ability, through good science, to build an instrument for a specific sound, or modify it for the sound a player needs. Sustain, balance, harmony, overtones- some of those qualities can be considered subjective, some are not.  Some are things you expect in a really good sounding guitar and that has to do with construction methods. But anyone can copy construction methods; it is really easy to figure out how a guitar is made. This sounds like a bit of hubris but I don’t mean it to be. It is much like the scientists who are trying to figure out the secrets of the Stradivarius by doing chemical analysis of finish, measurement, weights and so forth. But they are missing the boat because in those instruments you will find variants in all of those categories Stradivari did in order to achieve consistency, a nice dichotomy I think.

It seems now everyone has jumped on the Nitrocellulose finish bandwagon, thoughts?

We have always used a Nitrocellulose finish on our guitars. There are some things that I consider critical to the sound and construction of a really pro quality instrument- Nitrocellulose is one of them, the dovetail joint from neck to body is another. To a large degree there has been a lot of propaganda disseminated to make the average player think that those are old fashioned and they have been super-ceded by modern technology and improvements, but no, that is false.

The reason people don’t use Nitrocellulose or the dovetail joint is to benefit the manufacturer, not the player. Back to Nitrocellulose, it is cotton fiber that is dissolved in a solvent and what we have is liquid Cellulose. Cellulose is what trees are made out of, so we are spraying a coat of wood on wood. It doesn’t take much imagination to see why that would be superior to a catalytic ultraviolet cured polymer that looks like glass and is beautiful and durable but it’s thick and dampens the sound of the guitar and if you break it is like breaking a piece of glass. In an heirloom quality instrument what we really endeavor to do and I think we achieve by using Nitrocellulose finish is two things: we get a very thin finish that doesn’t hamper the nature of the resonance of the guitar keeping with our voicing and tuning of the instrument and also, it’s reparable if someone damages the guitar.

Again thinking of it as an heirloom quality piece, it is repairable and not disposable. Being able to fix it and make it look new is a big plus so it is good all around. Until we find a finish that does not take three weeks to do, that is maybe more durable,  or cosmetically perfect, until that time we will continue to use Nitrocellulose. It does take on the look of a violin rather than a bar top because it does take on the grain with temperature, but it is very protective it is tried and true. There are instruments out there that have been around for close to a century that have Nitrocellulose as the finish. It is perfectly fine and it is the right thing to use. So the reason you see it now being used more frequently, this sounds almost conspiratorial but I don’t mean it to be, they were not able to shake the fact that people get it, that it is superior and therefore becomes desirable in marketing again, they couldn’t sweep it under the rug.

Now usually you will find it on a limited edition as opposed to factory wide usage, because really, it is a pain. It is also more environmentally acceptable than modern finishes. Not to say it is as friendly as a water-based finish with no volatile organic based compounds, but it has a bit of a bluish cast, a milky finish, and doesn’t look expensive. What we say and what we buy are two different things. I would like to be able to say that we accomplish our quest for the best possible tone and environmental responsibility without compromise, but that just is not true.

Lets talk about wood.

No doubt you have read about the difficulty in some of the companies getting wood, even domestic woods, like good quality spruce or spruce.  We don’t share that same problem at all because we are not buying the same wood. The companies that you’ve seen that have become by necessity involved with Green Peace, Rain Forest Alliance, Cultural Survival organizations like that to be able to find good wood and I’m not saying that they are not motivated by doing the right thing, of course they are. What they are running up against is finding standing trees that are of instrument quality that they can access. We’re talking about our North American Rain Forest and although it looks vast a good portion of that stuff goes into house hold paper products or is exported to other countries for architectural elements, but again, that is not what we buy. We want dead standing trees, reclaimed sources. We bought a logging bridge in Alaska that had whole tree trunks used as a support for the bridge. We get wood that is 50 – 70 years old, that is exceptional sounding, vastly superior sounding to a new piece of wood that is dried out but the resins are still gooey. We have purchased logs that have been sunken, that were used to float fish traps by the Native Americans which is sweetly ironic because that is the way the Italian masters cured their wood, they sank it under water till the resins crystallized.

If we were to make 400 guitars a day that would not be a very practical way to source wood and it takes a lot of legwork to acquire that kind of wood. So we don’t suffer the same problem. We do use some tropical hardwoods and we get them from very responsible people that are like minded and they know to come to us and that is the sweet part. I do miss traveling to world looking for wood but I don’t have to anymore because I’ve made those contacts. I do some maintenance but people are coming to us with those sources because they know not only will we pay for it, but also we appreciate it and help promote the cause. There are a lot of people in the wood business that are like minded and want to do that. So our supplies are actually becoming easier to get. There’s not more of it, but we are not in the same food chain as the large companies that are having problems. One of the woods I am very concerned about is Mahogany from South America, it is truly a Rain Forest timber and unlike Brazilian Rosewood, which ironically is not, Brazilian is somewhat of a sacrificial lamb that was sacrificed by the Council on International Trade and Endangered Species(CITES). It went on the endangered species list, it’s not the problem because the tree needs to die before it will turn the pretty color that we want for making guitars, Mahogany is quite the contrary it can be cut down, it disrupts cultures, eco systems,  on and on.

Mahogany should be on the Council on International Trade and Endangered Species list at #1 as an endangered species. However, everyone uses it for furniture and guitars so now you are starting to see woods coming out of Africa that are Mahogany-like and Mahogany-looking and there is no explanation really necessary. In large companies instead of genuine Mahogany you’ll see a term like “select hardwood” being used for it and let me be careful not to slam anybody for this, but it’s business. The larger the company the more focus has to be placed on the business aspect and using woods out of Africa as alternatives is not, I’m going to say almost, not responsible environmentally. I don’t know because I don’t know where they come from, culturally it disrupts cultures and the labor practices are despicable with child labor, slave labor… I’m going to calm down; I tend to go off on stuff like this. I do want to say by using the stuff that we use there is a selfish aspect: we get better sounding guitars. I am not afraid to explore other alternatives and I’m being a bit redundant here, but to introduce an alternative in the market place really needs a big company to have the credibility. We would suffer maybe fatally economically before people would begin to accept it. So I’m not hesitant to show off new woods to big companies for that reason.

Brazilian Rosewood is considered to be the ultimate wood for making a guitar. What is your impression of the popularity of the wood?

Brazilian Rosewood is one of the few trees I have not gone out to verify where it was harvested from because I don’t believe I needed to. We buy it from a family that has been at it for generations and we are buying reclaimed rather than new trees. So, I wanted to dispel some myths. The Dalbergia Nigra which is the true Brazilian Rosewood we know and love comes from certain regions in and around Brazil and it grows more solitary on the plain. It is not a rain forest canopy timber which some people will just plain not believe as we have all been conditioned to think in those terms, but it does not make it any less of a threatened endangered species. For centuries it’s been one of the most desirable woods because it’s gorgeous, the color, depth, beauty, and it is reasonably workable, stable- you know, all the things a wood worker would want. It’s used for wood paneling, chopsticks, pipes, and instruments and on and on.

When I was starting out, one of the wood suppliers told me… this is in the early 70’s, that he use to lead expeditions in Brazil. He said that anything at that time that was within 250 miles of a navigate able water way or a road had pretty much been gotten. Now of course there are new cities in Brazil since that time. So it is an interesting pursuit getting the really pretty stuff. It needs to be old, but this doesn’t stop people from cutting living trees. The living tree is not as defined in color, the grains are further apart. You’ve heard grains qualified by how many grains per inch? Well, you’ve probable seen some modern guitars that are defined by how many inches per grain. And that is just not pretty, it is not beautiful and this kind of has to fall into the category of greed.

There is a reason that Brazilian Rosewood is desirable: its density, its tonality primarily, its beauty. So when you go to cutting a living tree, you’ve negated the beauty and you’ve also negated the tonality because it is not as dense. So you are not getting what is desirable in Brazilian Rosewood other than the name. So, is it the holy grail of tone wood? No. In tone woods, for a guitar there is a lot of variety and a lot of variance in the tone that it imparts to the guitar. But one is not better than the other in a sense of better or worse, it is different. The range in taste to your ear could desire another wood; you could want another wood easily. The desirability of Brazilian Rosewood, it makes a wonderful sounding guitar but it doesn’t make the best sounding guitar because no wood makes the best sounding guitar. Now here is the sweet little nuance I am often asked, what is the difference between Brazilian Rosewood and Indian Rosewood? Well they are both Jacarandas, but they grow continents apart. If you were to take a piece of reclaimed old cut Brazilian rosewood and compare it to a new growth Indian rosewood you would see that the old wood is vastly superior in tonal quality to the new growth. At the same point a piece of old growth Indian Rosewood with fine grain and density would have more integrity in its reflective quality of tone than a new growth Brazilian Rosewood. So the simple answer is no, not only is it not superior, certainly not inferior, but we are talking about a really broad generalization of the wood. Mahogany is a stupendous tone wood, so is Koa, so is Maple- they all impart a different brightness or darkness to the tone but we are so conditioned by desirability. Mahogany was always used on the cheaper Piano, the less expensive furniture and subsequently a less appointed, less expensive guitar. 

Here is the basis for this phenomenon: Brazilian Rosewood is expensive to acquire, really pretty stuff and it has probably gone through a lot of hands and is hard to come by. There has been an embargo on raw materials since 1969,  and1992 was when the CITES got involved and embargoed the wood exported in products with the signing countries. Given all that you pay plenty for it. It can add, in our case, 4500 and up on the retail end and that is just for the wood. There is a well-known company out of Pennsylvania that can add 20 000 on to the cost! Scarcity begets desirability and Brazilian Rosewood is scarce and it is not a short-lived trend like a lot of stuff where you pay a premium. You’re not going to get into line for a Miata anymore, but when it first came out you were paying extra just to get one. This is something that has been going on for… recorded furniture, woodworking history. People have had access to it since say the 1500’s- Brazilian Rosewood is not getting easier to get. So there is not only panache but there is a real value to having it and no one is going to come up with it for a lesser price. Having a guitar like our most expensive guitar with Brazilian Rosewood would maybe have a decades old Italian spruce top Mahogany from the 30’s and that all adds to the price of it and makes it awfully dang cool and also make a really good sounding guitar.

Can you tell me about the “Bench Style” of guitar building?  

The bench style of building is to give a visual to what we do. When you think of bench style, you think of wizened craftsmen with green eye shade half -frame glasses and sleeve guarders and a leather apron working at the bench. It has that connotation of hand made equals quality. We actually do that, where it is important instead of pre-shaping all of the components we are actually hand carving voicing and tuning the bracing on the top. That’s a lot of added time, it’s a lot of expertise and the results are spectacular in the final product. And that is exactly where that is done, it is done on a bench by a human being using their empirical body of knowledge, their training to evaluate a piece of wood, knowing how thick or thin to make it, how to listen to its resonance and how to get the best possible instrument out of the wood. The antithesis of that is the CNC machine that can take a scan of a handmade part and duplicate it without having to be touched by hand because some components of a guitar are just two dimensional shapes, decorative lets say, and the decoration has nothing to do with the form, function and playability and you would just plain wear people out with those repetitive tasks. Not only in a physical sense in repetitive stress problems but you wear them out mentally from the repetition. So by doing those things with state of the art equipment we can allow the people the time to do the custom work and to create the variety that can only be made by an individual’s judgment. So, practicing individual judgment based on our body of knowledge doesn’t roll off the tongue quite like “Bench Style.”

Will we ever see a solid body electric guitar from Santa Cruz?

I would say when, not if. Probably not solid body, but I don’t completely count it out. I’ve got some wonderful talented colleagues, dear friends that know more about electronics than I do and how to reproduce that. But my specialty and my network is cutting edge acoustic response. I think we can combine the two and I think we can do it to a great effect. But until I think we can do something that’s really appreciable and superior I don’t see a reason to enter into that market place just because we can. It is a market place that is pretty much dominated by celebrity endorsement, colors, associations and things like that. But that is certainly not our style, I want something that might not be the broad appeal, but it would be the absolute thing that the studio guy has to have, the best tool to represent their skills. So yes, I want to do that. There are other instrument too and I don’t know how cagy I want to be about this but, there is a particularly sought after prized stringed instrument that was done in the early 20’s that the value has gone up to about a quarter of a million dollars now.

As long as the label is signed I believe…

Yes! And it’s funny, when I say “I” a lot, because this really is a team effort, that is how we achieve what we do and get the quality that we do by the team interaction. We are privy to original specifications, finish formulas, voicings and tunings. It is not dimensions necessarily, as much as tunings and of course, the wood. Not the kind of wood mind you but “the wood” that was not only cut but seasoned, prepared and ready in that era, is that cool or what? I am waiting till I am worthy to do that. And likewise we have to be able to present something that is absolutely thrilling and fulfilling in doing otherwise it makes no sense. Because everyone makes copies of the really cool stuff and we don’t want to make a copy, we want to make “the” thing.

I’m really glad I didn’t get into violin building because it is unattainable. The qualities you need for that, I don’t have- which is being Italian and dead for several hundred years.

My real motivation in this is working with people, with a team of people, I like to teach and I like the satisfaction that comes from working. More and more of my job has become to protect, promote and defend the company and really just get the word out.