Santa Cruz Launches at Studio 1
Four instruments from one of the world's most respected acoustic builders — including a once-in-a-generation H-13 built from "The Tree."
In 1976, a small team of luthiers in Santa Cruz, California started building acoustic guitars the way they believed guitars should be built — by hand, one at a time, voiced and tap-tuned like violins. Fifty years later, Santa Cruz Guitar Company is celebrating its golden anniversary, and that founding philosophy hasn't shifted an inch. Richard Hoover and his team still build in modest numbers — each instrument voiced, tuned and tap-tested by hand, and each one capable of standing alongside the pre-war Martins that inspired the company's founding.
Richard Hoover often says that a truly great guitar must be designed to outlive its first owner. These are heirloom instruments — engineered to improve as they age, built light for resonance, and constructed with repairability in mind so they can be maintained and reset decades from now without compromising their acoustic integrity.
We're proud to announce that Studio 1 is now New Zealand's home for Santa Cruz Guitars — and there's no better year to make it official than their 50th.
To mark the occasion, we've brought in four guitars that represent the breadth and depth of what Santa Cruz does — from the Founder Series OM to fully custom builds, including instruments that generated serious conversation at NAMM 2026. All four are now in the store, ready to play, and live on the site. One of them — and we'll come back to this — is a guitar we expect to be talking about for years.
Why Santa Cruz
Richard Hoover in the Santa Cruz Guitar Company workshop
The short answer is craft. The longer answer is that Santa Cruz occupies a rare space in modern lutherie. They build in numbers small enough that every guitar is genuinely hand-voiced, but with enough consistency and institutional knowledge that you can walk in and reliably expect a world-class instrument — every time, across every model in the line. These are guitars that don't "top out" sonically — they continue to reveal complexity and responsiveness as your ears develop.
The craft shows up in the materials. Santa Cruz doesn't simply purchase commercial tonewood — much of their wood comes from reclaimed trees, salvaged lumber and carefully managed forests. Premium Adirondack and Sitka spruce, Indian and Brazilian rosewood, genuine Honduran mahogany of a grade that's becoming harder to come by every year — all selected by tap response, not just appearance. There's a reason for the obsession with aged and reclaimed wood: once timber is cut, its resins and cellular structures slowly crystallise, altering stiffness-to-weight ratios and enhancing resonance. It's the same ageing process responsible for the sound of the great vintage instruments. By air-drying wood for extended periods and sourcing reclaimed stock that has already undergone decades of natural ageing, Santa Cruz gives their new guitars a legitimate head start toward that vintage voice.
The building methods are equally deliberate: scalloped pre-war-style bracing with parabolic profiles for strength at a fraction of the weight, hot hide glue for top bracing and bridges, nitrocellulose lacquer finish, book-matched backs, and tops that are graduated and tap-tuned by hand to a specific resonance before the box is closed up — a technique borrowed directly from violin making. Every guitar is voiced as a singular instrument rather than a unit off a production line. Even the neck joint matters: Santa Cruz uses a traditional dovetail rather than a bolt-on, creating a continuous wood-to-wood energy path that transfers string vibration more efficiently into the body. Richard Hoover considers the neck an active part of the soundboard system, not just a structural connection — and it's one of the primary reasons these guitars project so strongly relative to their light build weight.
Santa Cruz luthier adjusting a neck joint
Played by the best
That level of care has attracted a roster of players that most boutique builders can only dream of. Tony Rice — the most important bluegrass flatpicker of the modern era — collaborated with Richard Hoover for more than three decades, right up until his death in 2020. His Tony Rice Signature Model (D/PW) is a pre-war-spec dreadnought built to his specification and remains one of the most revered flattop designs of the last fifty years. Richard Hoover himself has said that while making guitars for other notables was important, "nobody was the opinion leader like Tony was. He really charted our destiny."
Beyond Tony Rice, the list of Santa Cruz players reads like a short history of modern acoustic music: Eric Clapton, David Crosby, Joan Baez, Ben Harper, Brad Paisley, Janis Ian, Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen have all put their names to Santa Cruz instruments. Tony Rice, Brad Paisley and Janis Ian all have signature models in the catalogue. When the finest flatpickers, songwriters and studio players choose a small Californian workshop over anything else they could own, that tells you something the marketing never could.
Custom work — two slots available
Richard Hoover selecting tonewood from the Santa Cruz library
Custom work sits at the heart of the Santa Cruz philosophy. Their luthiers' combined experience spans over a century, and they are trained across multiple disciplines rather than assigned a single repetitive task — acousticians, not assemblers. The Custom Shop base price gives you access to Santa Cruz's full menu of options — tonewoods, neck profiles, scale lengths, voicing style and appointments — without a separate design fee layered on top. Individual spec upgrades such as premium tonewoods or specific inlays are itemised transparently from there. That kind of direct, collaborative access to a builder of this calibre is genuinely unusual in 2026.
We have two custom-build slots open on our next Santa Cruz order. Slots must be confirmed by the end of June — once they're committed, the next opportunity won't come around for several months. If you've ever wanted to spec an instrument from the ground up — an all-mahogany small body, a Tony Rice Professional, a Brazilian-backed OM — now is the time to start that conversation.
The Santa Cruz Series
Before we get to the four guitars we've brought in, it's worth understanding where they sit within the broader Santa Cruz line. The catalogue isn't large — it's deliberately compact — but it covers a serious amount of ground.
At the core are the Founder Series: the OM (Orchestra Model), the D (Dreadnought), the 00 and 000 — the classic American flat-top shapes, each refined over decades of building. These are the guitars that established Santa Cruz's reputation: pre-war-inspired construction, premium tonewoods, hand voicing. They represent the entry point to Santa Cruz ownership and they are, by any reasonable measure, superb instruments.
From there, the line branches into heritage and signature series. The 1929 Series is a Depression-era-inspired all-mahogany parlour that Santa Cruz introduced during the 2008 financial crisis — a deliberate nod to the simple, elegant instruments Martin built for players enduring the Great Depression. It helped establish mahogany as a serious tonewood in its own right and influenced the entire industry's subsequent move toward all-mahogany designs. The Pre-War Series (PW) is the full pre-war treatment — advanced X and scalloped bracing, master-grade materials, understated appointments that let the tone and workmanship speak for themselves. The OM/PW won industry awards when it was introduced and remains one of the most respected OMs in production anywhere. The Tony Rice Professional (D/PW) is the pre-war dreadnought built to Tony Rice's personal specification — one of the most revered flatpicker designs of the last fifty years. The Catfish Professional is Catfish Keith's all-mahogany 0-model, purpose-built for country blues.
Then there's the Custom Series — the H-13, the Firefly, one-off builds to player spec — where the full depth of Santa Cruz's lutherie comes into play. Any series can be customised, but the true custom designs are where Richard Hoover's team can flex half a century of accumulated knowledge.
The four guitars we've brought in span these series deliberately: a Founder OM, a parlour 00, the Catfish Professional, and a fully custom H-13 built from the most coveted tonewood in the world.
The Four Guitars
Santa Cruz OM — NZ $14,400 incl GST
Santa Cruz OM
The Orchestra Model is the guitar that broadly re-defined what a fingerstyle flat-top could do. Santa Cruz's version pairs a solid Sitka spruce top with solid Indian rosewood back and sides, scalloped Sitka bracing, a 25.375" scale and a 1¾" nut — a comfortable modern platform for players who want the balanced voice of the traditional OM without the relic treatment.
What sets this one apart from a stock OM is in the small details: herringbone rosette and top border, ivoroid body, fingerboard and peghead binding, a mother-of-pearl SCGC logo on the headstock, 2mm mother-of-pearl fingerboard dots, and a V-shaped mahogany neck with a volute. Ebony fingerboard and bridge, ebony pyramid-dotted bridge pins, Waverly nickel tuners with oval knobs. Light in the hand, resonant, and so well-balanced across the frequency spectrum that it genuinely feels like it could walk a tightrope. Equally at home under delicate fingerpicking or assertive flatpicking.
Santa Cruz 00 Mahogany — NZ $16,800 incl GST
Santa Cruz 00 Mahogany
A compact 12-fret 00 with a surprisingly big voice. Solid Sitka spruce over solid mahogany, with scalloped Adirondack bracing set in hot hide glue — the pre-war-era recipe that gives the top a particular top-end snap and liveliness in the low-mids.
A 24.75" short scale, V-neck profile, slotted peghead, diamonds-and-squares short-pattern fingerboard inlays in mother of pearl, and a single black binding and backstrip. Ebony pyramid bridge. Waverly slotted nickel tuners with ebony oval knobs. The appointments are deliberately understated — it's a player's guitar, not a showpiece — and the whole instrument is as light as a feather. Tuned for someone who wants a small-bodied guitar that rewards a soft touch and still projects.
Santa Cruz Catfish Professional — NZ $17,600 incl GST
Santa Cruz Catfish Professional
A custom 1929 0-model built originally for country bluesman Catfish Keith. When Santa Cruz delivered Keith his first all-mahogany 0 a few years back, enough players wrote in asking about "the little guitar with the giant voice" that the Catfish Professional became a formal model.
The Professional is all solid figured Catfish-grade mahogany — top, back and sides — finished in a mellow 1929 Sunburst. 24.75" scale, 12-fret construction, scalloped bracing, V-neck, ivoroid binding throughout, and two signature appointments that set it apart: custom bubble fingerboard inlays and a Catfish peghead inlay with an ivoroid Santa Cruz script logo (no "Guitar Company" — a detail specific to this model). Ebony pyramid bridge, Waverly nickel tuners. Purpose-built for country blues but equally at home in ragtime, folk, and singer-songwriter work. A small guitar with a woody, midrange-rich voice unlike anything else in the current Santa Cruz line.
Santa Cruz H-13 — The Tree
Interior label detail — wax-sealed and signed
Our fourth guitar is, by some distance, the most remarkable new instrument we've ever brought into the store. It's a Santa Cruz H-13 — one of Santa Cruz's most distinctive and quietly famous custom designs — and its back and sides are cut from a piece of mahogany with a story worth telling in full.
The H-13's lineage traces back to 1978, when luthier Paul Hostetter approached Richard Hoover with a vintage Gibson Nick Lucas Special — the small, unusually deep-bodied flat-top Bob Dylan played on Bringing It All Back Home — and asked for something inspired by it. What Santa Cruz developed was a 00-footprint body made considerably deeper than standard (around 4⅝" at the lower bout), paired with a longer 25.375" scale length and a neck that joins the body at the 13th fret rather than the usual 12 or 14. The geometry is deliberate: the longer scale increases downward pressure at the saddle for more drive, the deeper body increases internal air volume for more bass and resonance, and the 13-fret join puts the bridge in exactly the right spot on the top to get the most out of both. The result is a small-bodied guitar that punches dramatically above its size.
The Tree — The World's Most Coveted Tonewood
Richard Hoover among the California redwoods
In 1965, deep in the Chiquibul rainforest of what was then British Honduras, a small party of loggers came upon a mahogany giant. It stood over 100 feet tall, measured 10 feet across at the base, and ran 50 feet clean to the first branch. It was estimated to be approximately 500 years old — a tree that had germinated while the Maya were still the dominant civilisation in the region.
The loggers noticed the bark was spiralled in a way they'd never seen before, a telltale sign of extreme figuring in the wood inside. Armed only with axes, they spent weeks working through the trunk. When it finally fell, it fell the wrong way — backward into a ravine, in terrain too dense and too steep to extract with the equipment of the day. They left it where it lay.
It sat on the jungle floor for more than a decade. Howling monkeys, vipers, tarantulas, a month of flooding — and somehow, miraculously, the wood didn't rot. When American hardwood importer Robert Novak finally laid eyes on it in the late 1970s, he said simply: "It was just very beautiful. And the wood was stable. That's unusual for something that had sat in the forest on the ground for so long."
Novak bought the tree, then spent the better part of two years extracting it. Quartering, re-quartering, dragging sections up the ravine with a tractor, trucking them 90 miles through virgin jungle to the Chiquibul River, floating them 70 miles downstream to a steam-powered sawmill, and then milling it one-sixteenth of an inch at a time. The final yield was roughly 12,000 board feet — of which only around 500 board feet was truly defect-free, and 3,000 board feet carried the heavy quilted figure the wood would become famous for.
This is the wood known today, simply and reverentially, as The Tree.
What Makes It Different
Two things, and they're remarkable in combination.
The first is the figure. The Tree produces patterns seen nowhere else in mahogany: a tortoiseshell pattern with dark veiny outlines resembling a turtle's shell; a "sausage quilt" of wide horizontal waves crossed with vertical tendrils; and a wild blistered pattern that looks like the wood is bubbling under its own surface. The colour ranges from deep chocolate-brown to rich red with nearly golden highlights, and the wood has a three-dimensional chatoyance — it appears to ripple and move as light shifts across it — that most luthiers will tell you they've never seen in any other timber, hardwood or otherwise.
The second is the sound. For most of the 20th century, mahogany was considered the workmanlike second cousin to rosewood — drier, snappier, less complex. The Tree broke that consensus. Master luthier Harvey Leach, who built more than a dozen guitars from the wood and was initially sceptical of the hype, described his first encounter this way: "I was immediately stunned by its beauty… and it sounded magical. It was nothing like mahogany but more like the very best Brazilian rosewood, with this astonishing clarity and bass response."
Leach went on to build two OMs side by side — one from The Tree, one from actual Brazilian rosewood. His conclusion, now famous in lutherie circles: "The guitar built from The Tree somehow sounded a little more like it was built from Brazilian rosewood than the one that actually was."
Tom Ribbecke, who has built more than a dozen Tree instruments — including a 335-style electric for Seal and a matched trio of archtop, steel-string and bass with one-piece Tree backs — describes a bass response "that is almost overwhelming." Kevin Hennig of Symphontree puts it more bluntly: "Tree 'hog is like traditional 'hog on steroids — thus, you get a very snappy box and thicker, wetter tone."
Who's Built With It
The list reads like a who's-who of modern acoustic lutherie: Robert Taylor, Richard Hoover at Santa Cruz, Tom Ribbecke, Harvey Leach, Michael Greenfield, Dana Bourgeois, Ervin Somogyi, Ken Parker, Froggy Bottom, Bedell. Greenfield's G4.2 with a 17-inch one-piece Tree back is played by Andy McKee and widely regarded as one of the finest acoustic instruments ever built. Slash has a custom Reuben Forsland jumbo with a Tree back and sides paired with 2,800-year-old glacier Sitka spruce and wood from a house Jimi Hendrix once occupied. His verdict: "It was a shock-and-awe moment. It changed everything I'd ever thought about acoustic guitars."
What Remains
An estimated 100 to 200 tonewood sets remain in the world. Completed Tree guitars by top builders routinely sell in the US $15,000 to 40,000 range, and they rarely stay on the market long. Once the remaining sets are built, The Tree is gone.
Our H-13
Our Santa Cruz H-13 — built from The Tree
Richard Hoover's own philosophy on The Tree is characteristically measured. "It's the beauty of the wood that's desirable," he says. "Making a Tree guitar sound good is just part of the craft of building a great instrument… not all Tree wood is suitable for a top — some is too flexible and too random in density. We chose a particular piece that was stiffer than most Tree wood you would find, and made it with proper bracing and thickness."
That care is exactly what separates a guitar built with The Tree from a Tree guitar worth playing. Our H-13 was voiced by the Santa Cruz team specifically around this set: a deep-body 00 with the 13-fret neck join, paired with a premium Adirondack spruce top over Tree mahogany back and sides, scalloped and tapered Adirondack bracing set in hot hide glue, a V-profile mahogany neck, 1¾" nut, 25.375" scale and a slotted peghead. The cosmetic appointments are considered and restrained for a guitar of this pedigree: ivoroid body and fingerboard binding, a cowboy-rope rosette and matching top border, a zipper backstrip, ebony pyramid bridge, Waverly slotted nickel tuners, and an ivoroid Santa Cruz script logo on the headstock. A teardrop sunburst finish frames the Adirondack top beautifully and lets the figure of the Tree mahogany do the talking on the back and sides.
It will be the only Santa Cruz "Tree" guitar in New Zealand, and quite possibly the only "Tree" that will ever come into the country. If you would like to hear it, touch it, and play it, please register your interest with us directly.
The 50th Anniversary Greatest Hits Collection
As if the regular line wasn't enough to mark the occasion, Santa Cruz is celebrating their 50th anniversary with something special: the Greatest Hits Collection — five of their most iconic and celebrated designs, built in limited numbers with unique 50th anniversary heel caps and interior labelling, and offered at throwback pricing to make the celebration as accessible as possible.
The first two guitars have been announced. The 50th Anniversary 1929-00 — the all-mahogany parlour that was welcomed internationally as "both timely and timeless" when it debuted, with sparkling reviews from the most prestigious publications in France, Germany, the UK and the US. Vintage-inspired appointments include scalloped bracing, a period-correct script logo in ivoroid, an ebony pyramid bridge, and a tortoise rosette nestled in a vintage ivoroid border. The 50th Anniversary OM/PW — the Pre-War Orchestra Model that caused a paradigm shift when players first heard what a truly sophisticated guitar could do at its price point. Under the hood, the Pre-War design package honours its pre-WWII predecessors with advanced X and scalloped top bracing. Both are fitted with the special 50th heel cap and interior label.
Three more Greatest Hits guitars are still to be revealed. We'll be stocking these as they become available — if you'd like to be first to know when we have allocation confirmed, register your interest with us directly. Limited-run anniversary instruments from a builder of this calibre don't tend to hang around.
Come and See Them
The Santa Cruz workshop
All four Santa Cruz guitars are now in the shop and live on our site — ready to play today.
If you'd like to commission a custom Santa Cruz through one of our two remaining build slots, or if you'd like to hear the H-13 in person, contact Garrick directly at garrick@studio1.co.nz or drop into the store. We'd love to talk you through what's possible.
Welcome to Santa Cruz at Studio 1.