One Man's 35-Year Mission to Keep Guitar Building Alive

In Winters, there’s a workshop where raw wood becomes music, and a retired pastor named Al Calderone refuses to let a dying craft disappear on his watch.

For 35 years, Calderone has been teaching acoustic guitar building at ARC Guitar—a hands-on luthier shop that stands out precisely because it shouldn’t have to. Of the roughly dozen guitar-building schools in the entire country, Calderone’s is the only one in California. That scarcity tells you something about how close we’ve come to losing this skill altogether. Most guitars today roll off factory lines by the thousands. Hand-built instruments? Those are rare. Luthiers willing to teach the craft to the next generation? Even rarer.

What makes Calderone’s operation remarkable isn’t just the rarity of what he does—it’s the passion driving it. Now 68, he didn’t build his first guitar until age 40, finally answering a dream he’d carried since he was 18. Since then, he’s crafted nearly 90 guitars and guided 136 students through the painstaking process of bringing their own instruments to life. He speaks about that first sound a finished guitar makes—what he calls“baby’s first cry”—with the kind of reverence usually reserved for spiritual experiences. For a retired pastor, that’s probably fitting.

His students come from everywhere. Finn Abiko drives two and a half hours from Lake Tahoe every month to work on a guitar he’s building as a surprise for his father. It’s a labor of love that’s already stretched over a year and will consume roughly 200 hours before it’s complete. Matt Hader made the journey all the way from Utah, not just to learn the craft but to bring it back home and start building guitars to sell. These aren’t hobbyists passing through—they’re people willing to invest serious time and distance because opportunities like this simply don’t exist elsewhere.

The real lesson here isn’t just about guitars. It’s about what happens when someone decides that knowing how to do something difficult and beautiful is worth protecting. Calderone has built his entire second act around making sure the next generation doesn’t inherit a world where acoustic guitar building is museum knowledge. He’s not in it for the money. He’s in it because, as he puts it,“It’s the joy in my heart.”At an age when most people think about slowing down, he’s still teaching day and night with no plans to stop. He’s even joked about dying on his work bench—with a tombstone reading,“He worked on it.”

That kind of commitment to a craft in an age of mass production and digital shortcuts? That’s what endangered species looks like. And we’re lucky Calderone’s still at that bench.