Santa Cruz Guitar Company
2019 Santa Cruz VJ
2019 · Listed at Willie's American Guitars · Saint Paul, MN
Tracked on Tonewood Atlas — view the full listing at Willie's American Guitars’ site.
Photos hot-linked from Willie's American Guitars’ site — never rehosted.
Specs
- Top
- European Spruce
- Back / Sides
- Mahogany
- Neck
- Mahogany
- Fingerboard
- Ebony
- Body shape
- VJ
- Scale length
- 25.4"
- Nut width
- 1 3/4"
- Frets to body
- 14
- Strings
- 6
- Cutaway
- No
- Condition
- Preowned
- Year
- 2019
Santa Cruz Guitar Company
Santa Cruz Guitar Company has built guitars in Santa Cruz, California since 1976, when Richard Hoover founded the shop to bring violin-lutherie traditions into acoustic guitar building. Each top is tap-tuned by hand in a strictly climate-controlled workshop. The shop's connection with Tony Rice — the Tony Rice Model is modeled on his pre-war Martin D-28 — anchored its reputation in bluegrass flatpicking, and the catalog has expanded over five decades into a deep custom-shop operation where most builds are individually specified rather than spec-built.
Willie's American Guitars
Willie's American Guitars is a long-running Saint Paul anchor in the Mac-Groveland neighborhood, operating since the 1980s and specializing in vintage and boutique acoustic guitars in equal measure. The floor pairs deep Martin and Gibson vintage with curated new boutique builds — Collings, Santa Cruz, and Larrivée rotate alongside Martin Custom Shop and the occasional surprise in their "Other" subcategory. The shop is small enough to know every instrument on the wall and old enough that the wall has seen a lot of inventory pass through. For Upper Midwest players, they're the closest serious destination for both ends of the acoustic spectrum — current builds and historic instruments under one roof.