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The first thing that greets me as I walk into Santa Cruz Guitar Co. is a life-size cardboard cutout of a smiling Richard Hoover, the company’s founder. The second thing is the real smiling Richard Hoover, holding out a box of doughnuts.

“That one’s covered in health-food crumbs,” he says, pointing to the one my gaze had fallen on.

The 42-year-old guitar company, famed for its boutique acoustic guitars, welcomes visitors for tours, which Hoover leads himself (doughnuts not guaranteed). He closes his eyes when talking about his personal journey to becoming a master luthier, the preferred term for a maker of string instruments, but his eyes pop open brightly when he tells a self-deprecating joke.

He asks how long I’ve played guitar. Twenty-five years, I tell him. Hoover beats that by several decades. “Then why aren’t we better?” he asks with an impish grin.

Hoover has a good excuse: He’s spent his years perfecting the art of building guitars, not playing them. Pictures on the wall of Tony Rice, Norman Blake and Brad Paisley hint at how Santa Cruz gained its reputation. When the acoustic guitar started becoming more of a lead instrument in bluegrass and country in the ’70s, players wanted to customize their guitars not just for aesthetics, but for tone. Hoover, who learned to build guitars following the tradition of fine violin makers, tuning each instrument for maximum resonance and customizing tone to a player’s style, was the man to turn to.

A bluesy melody floats across the factory from a guitar in its final stages of being built for a finger-style jazz player.

“First words,” Hoover says, with the look of a proud father.

Santa Cruz may not fit into the typical geographies of bluegrass or jazz, but it was the perfect setting for Hoover’s workshop.

“Santa Cruz is artistic, quirky, diverse and tolerant,” Hoover says. “It’s been that way not just since the ’60s, but since the 1860s. Some places are just a vortex for that creative spirit.”

That vortex apparently encompasses the entire California coast, which is studded with guitar makers ranging from some of the largest guitar manufacturers in the world to a growing community of small luthiers. California has more than twice as many guitar makers as any other state, according to research from industry tracker IbisWorld. That’s good news for guitar players, woodworkers or anyone who’s simply curious to see how things are made, because many of these guitar makers are happy to show you their craft up close, from the traditional art to how California continues to shape the way the world sees and plays guitars.

How did California become the guitar capital of the U.S.? Andy Powers, master guitar designer at Taylor Guitars, points to Southern California.

“It’s always been a hotbed of the nation’s culture, from fashion to architecture to television and movies,” Powers says. “We have a culture that values new ideas, freethinking artists and people developing new technologies.”

New technologies are certainly evident on the tour of Taylor’s factory in El Cajon, east of San Diego. To mass-produce high-quality acoustic guitars in the U.S., Taylor workers had to design their own tools to make that possible. Robotic arms maneuver guitar bodies as they’re spray finished and then cured in ultraviolet light ovens. Another robot arm swings in to buff the guitars to a high shine.

The robotic-arm era of guitar making might never have happened without one key invention that emerged out of Southern California in the 1930s: the electric guitar. George Beauchamp, co-founder of National String Instrument Corp., spent his evenings tinkering with electronics on his dining room table looking for new ways to make the guitar loud enough to hold its own in bands. His first working prototype became the basis for Rickenbacker electric guitars, later made famous by George Harrison and John Lennon, and frequently smashed to bits by Pete Townshend.

It took Leo Fender, a radio repairman and inventor from Fullerton (Orange County), to provide the spark that made the electric guitar and bass explode onto the global music scene after World War II. Fender’s guitars were thin, solid-body designs that could be mass-produced. Starting with the Telecaster and fretted Precision Bass, Fender guitars were the sounds that defined rock ’n’ roll and Motown, put the twang in the Bakersfield Sound, and influenced nearly every musical genre since.

“Leo was the first to democratize the electric guitar,” says Fender CEO Andy Mooney. “A big part of Fender’s global success is its umbilical connection to California, to surf culture, to all of the good life people associate with California.”

If you go Santa Cruz Guitar Co.: Free tours 2:30 p.m. Thursdays and 10 a.m. Fridays. Call or email at least one week in advance to reserve a spot. 151 Harvey West Blvd., Suite C, Santa Cruz; 831-425-0999; scgc@santacruzguitar.com; www .santacruzguitar.com Fender Musical Instruments: Free tours 10 a.m. Thursdays, starting again in February. 301 Cessna Circle, Corona. Reserve a spot by calling Fender customer service at 800-856-9801 or the Corona office at 951-898-4022. Taylor Guitars: Free tours 1 p.m. weekdays; TaylorWare store open 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. weekdays. No reservations needed except for large groups. Check website for closure days. 1980 Gillespie Way, El Cajon; www .taylorguitars.com/contact/factory-tours Blackbird Guitars: Factory showroom open to visitors by appointment, with bird’s-eye view over the factory floor. 2180 Folsom St., San Francisco. Set up a time to visit at www .blackbirdguitar.com/pages/contact or call 415-625-0977. National Reso-Phonic Guitars: Free tours 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday . Call or message online at least one week in advance to reserve a time. 871 Via Esteban #C, San Luis Obispo; 877-882-3035; www.nationalguitars.com/contact-us

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On the Fender factory tour in Corona (Riverside County), historic guitars line the hallways, tracing the company’s history back to the early origins in 1946 in nearby Fullerton. A guide takes you behind the scenes of the main production line and into the custom shop, where they’ve made guitars for Eric Clapton, John Mayer and Sheryl Crow. Right now they’re working with Jimmy Page to re-create his favored 1959 Telecaster.

Despite recent worries that the era of the guitar hero had passed and the guitar might be playing its swan song after Gibson filed for bankruptcy in May 2018, guitar sales are up, thanks in part to the popularity of acoustic guitars and a ukulele boom. Guitar heroes haven’t gone away; they’re just looking different these days.

Guitar makers point to Taylor Swift (who plays both Taylor and Fender guitars) and St. Vincent (who plays a guitar she designed with Ernie Ball Music Man in San Luis Obispo) as part of a new generation of guitar heroes.

“Around 45 percent of our sales are to new players, and half of these are women,” Mooney says. “We’re seeing a much broader gender mix and a broader genre use than ever before.”

With a new generation of players comes a new list of demands, and high among them is sustainability, no small feat in an industry that has historically relied on rare tropical hardwoods. Perhaps it’s no surprise that California makers have happily stepped up to the challenge. Taylor works extensively in Cameroon and Hawaii to create sustainable sources of ebony and koa. Santa Cruz uses reclaimed California woods in its guitars, from salvaged redwood to 2,000-year-old sycamore unearthed after the Loma Prieta quake.

San Francisco’s Blackbird Guitars takes a different approach to wood: not using it.

When I meet Joe Luttwak at Blackbird Guitars in the small factory in San Francisco’s Mission District, he’s on the phone talking about flax supply. The slender, blue-flowered plant that gives us linen, linseed oil, linoleum and those smooth brown seeds that get stuck in your teeth when you eat multigrain bread is also the key component of Blackbird’s instruments.

“It started as a purely selfish personal project to build the ultimate small-body travel guitar,” Luttwak says. A travel guitar has to be lighter and more durable than wood, but it still has to sound amazing. Nothing on the market checked all of those boxes.

A product designer by training, Luttwak looked to molded composites to solve the problem. Blackbird’s early models were made of carbon fiber, but they transitioned to a new material they call Ekoa, made of flax fibers and a bio-based resin. For guitarists, who can be surprisingly traditional when it comes to aesthetics, Ekoa has an important quality: It looks surprisingly like wood, with a mahogany hue and subtle natural patterns from the flax fibers running parallel on the guitar’s soundboard like a piece of high-grade spruce.

“We’ve beaten spruce,” Luttwak says. “It has equal stiffness, but it’s lighter, and it has higher resistance to humidity and temperature changes. And an old-growth tree gets to stay in the ground.”

Luttwak originally hails from the East Coast, but to him it’s perfectly natural that he ended up in California trying to build the guitar of the future.

“California has an ecosystem of materials, suppliers and parts that has developed over decades,” Luttwak says. “But there’s also just an inspiration that comes from being in this place.”

Andy Murdock is a freelance writer in Alameda. Email: travel@sfchronicle.com