James Nash didn’t pack a guitar when he went off to college, which in hindsight was a boneheaded move.

Nash was 17 at the time and had been playing for about a dozen years. He was good. But he didn’t have any plans to “do music seriously” and didn’t think he’d play much while he was at school.

That didn’t last. Once you’ve discovered you enjoy playing the guitar, you can’t stop playing the guitar. It wasn’t long before Nash was borrowing guitars, playing whatever he could get his hands on whenever he could get his hands on it. Somewhere along the line he picked up a cheap Japanese guitar and was happy.

His father, however, was not.

Dad loved music and always had nice guitars lying around. It wouldn’t do to have his son playing something that sounded like a cat in heat. He showed up one day with a Santa Cruz Guitar six-string he’d picked up secondhand. An OM, Sitka spruce and Indian rosewood.

“Here,” he said. “Play this.”

It was perfect, with a bright, clear tone and great sound. Well, almost perfect. The neck was just a bit ... off. Not quite the right shape. No amount of adjustment would set it right. Finally, Nash walked into Santa Cruz Guitars to see what they could do.

“Let me have a look at that,” company founder Richard Hoover said. Santa Cruz was — and still is — a small place, the kind of place where Hoover himself will show you around if you ask for a tour. He did everything he could think of to set that neck right, but nothing worked. So he made a new neck and installed it for free, just because.

Nash, who’s 37 now, still has that guitar. He’s played it at hundreds of gigs with his band, The Waybacks. And all these years later, he hasn’t forgotten what Hoover did for a kid who wandered in one day looking for some help.

“You never forget something like that,” Nash said. “I was a 20-year-old kid. A no one. Not even in a band. But he treated me nicely when he had absolutely no reason to, or anything to gain from it.”

That’s how they are at Santa Cruz Guitar.

Above: Gerard Egan sets up a guitar before it heads out the door at Santa Cruz Guitar. It takes about four hours to install and adjust everything that touches the strings, from the bridge to the frets to the tuning keys. Once a guitar is properly set up, it’s played to make sure everything is just right.

“He'll make the guitars speak their first words,” Hoover said.