Santa Cruz 1929 00 2009, Mahogany

About 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. …

About Carter Vintage Guitars

Carter Vintage Guitars sits at 606 8th Avenue South in Nashville, opened November 2012 by Walter and Christie Carter — each with twenty-five years in the vintage guitar business before they put their names on a shop. Walter spent a decade as Gibson's in-house historian and has authored a dozen books on vintage instruments, including "Gibson: 100 Years of an American Icon" and "Gruhn's Guide to Vintage Guitars"; Christie's focus was the high-end vintage market. The shop's reputation is built on full-disclosure transparency around condition, originality, and provenance — a standard set early and still held to. The catalog leads with vintage — pre-war Martins, original-finish Gibsons, vintage Fender — but the new-boutique acoustic side runs deep alongside it: Collings, Bourgeois, Santa Cruz, Huss & Dalton, Goodall, McPherson, Lowden, and Furch are anchor brands, with a rotating long tail of smaller US luthiers (Boucher, Pre-War Guitars Co., Beauregard, Sexauer, Tippin, Kevin Ryan, and others) passing through. Carter became part of TNAG Global in 2022 — the parent holding company that also acquired Norman's Rare Guitars in early 2026 — but day-to-day curation has stayed centered on the original Carter team. Worldwide shipping; in-person browsing on 8th Avenue South.

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