The Progression of 812 Guitars

“The basic idea is to take any regular or round-about instrument and make it better... in particular for the given player. Not everyone is the same.”
- Chavez on 812 Guitars

The above is the essential maxim for 812 Guitars; it’s why Chavez does what he does; it’s also how he knows there is a market for it. “In terms of what I do, it’s a little more personal. If you go to just a regular repair joint, you ask them to do something and they just do it. Here, there’s a little more.”

Chavez started realizing around age 20 that not only does the musician have a voice; so does the instrument. And not just the one you get from playing it. At that point in his life, Chavez was working at East Coast Music Mall under the tutelage of Barry Lippman. “The thing that sucks about luthier in general… there are schools for it, but it’s not like a regular job where you study and go out and drop into a job. You really have to want it and search for a place to be an apprentice. I worked at East Coast for about 1½ years before I was taken on as a tech. I don’t know what the hell it is, but I was really drawn to the instrument… I don’t know why. It was like some old-world vibe I was picking up on,” he says with a laugh.

And that’s entirely possible: not only was Chavez’s father a novice carpenter; his grandfather was a carpenter of some genius around the time of the 1930’s, having created in particular a model plane at 1/16th scale complete with a removable top and detailed interior. From birth, it seemed, woodworking was in Chavez’s blood.

At age 14 Chavez got his first guitar and, in a moment of frustration, smashed it against the stairs in his basement, where he would often tinker with things. “Either later that night or the following day I took a look at it and realized the neck was twisted. I felt like an ass about it. There’s no fixing a neck like that really.” But he tried. He fashioned a new neck from a 2 X 4 he found, and later refinished the guitar blindly. “I sanded it down with whatever tools my father had... Did a horrible job of it. And I refinished it with cheap polyurethane, which never cured. The fucking thing was always sticky,” he says, laughing again.

The poor guitar had no chance. But at age 16 Chavez was back at it; he created something best described as “Bass-n-stein.” He took a copy Stratocaster and combined it with an old bass. “I had a bunch of parts lying around and at some point or another I was like ‘hmm… “It’s one of those times where you just go at something and see what you make.” When asked how he would describe the result he says, “Well, it was a bass. Or you could call it that, if you will. The parts were all junky; the neck was a piece of shit really, from one of those horrible knock-offs that come from like… Asia. But I had an idea of where everything needed to go… and it worked.”

His high school friends thought more of it. “It works!” One of them cried incredulously.

So Chavez kept building. As crude as his first attempts were, they showed promise.

In 2005 Chavez began fixing instruments for Ernie Albert of the popular Connecticut cover band The Short Bus. Ernie was sufficiently impressed with Chavez’s skill that he continually encouraged him to open his own shop. Soon Chavez was fixing instruments for the whole band.

In 2008 Chavez finally acquired both the funding and the time to open 812 Guitars. The customers are starting to come in, and they are satisfied. “The shop is really cool. It’s like the bat-cave really… it’s sort of dark.” Chavez chuckles. (See the 812 business card for a further glimpse at some Batman-like inspiration.) “Because it’s so dark, you walk in and you get the feeling that the only thing that really matters is what’s on the bench, which is all lit up. It’s like you’re putting life into something that…wasn’t really there.”  And his customers would likely agree that this is exactly what he is doing.