Repairs & Research

I trained at the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery in Phoenix in 2012 and came to San Francisco to work at Blackbird Guitar, building instruments from composite materials as an answer to the shrinking supply of tonewoods. Since then I've done repair and setup work at Mountain Music in Oakland and with Rabeca São Paulo in Brazil.

That bench work led to a question I spent four years trying to answer: how does the knowledge of making an instrument actually pass from one person to the next? It isn't written down anywhere. It lives in hands, in workshops, in the particular way someone tells you you're holding a chisel wrong. I followed that question through guitar shops, factories, and apprenticeship programs in São Paulo and across California, working in Portuguese, supported by a Fulbright fellowship.

The result was a doctoral dissertation, Guitar Makers in São Paulo and California: Labor, Sound, and Sustainability, completed at UC Berkeley in 2025, along with a photographic archive of more than 150 images and a book chapter on craft pedagogy, currently in press. I've presented this work at the American Musicological Society, the 21st Century Guitar Conference in Lisbon, and the University of Edinburgh.

I teach Music of the Caribbean and Brazil at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and I taught for seven years at UC Berkeley across American popular music, Brazilian music, and Western art music.

The two halves of this work are not separate. I got access to the workshops I wrote about because I could pick up a tool and talk shop, and I understand what I was looking at because I'd spent years doing it myself. The research made me a more thoughtful maker. The making made me a better researcher.

I take on setups, fretwork, electronics, and structural repair on acoustic and electric guitars, basses, and upright bass. Get in touch about availability and rates.