With Handcrafted Driftwood Guitars Chris Alvarado Rocks 30A

By Nicole Willis

hris Alvarado is a luthier, musician and 30A local who crafts playable pieces of art. As the founder and owner of Driftwood Guitars, Alvarado creates one-of-a-kind, handcrafted acoustic guitars that both sound and look beautiful.

Alvarado established Driftwood Guitars in 2007, but has had a love of both music and craftsmanship since a young age. His love for music stems from being around his father, who has been a musician since Alvarado was young.

“My dad is a full-time musician; even when he was in the military, he played music full-time, so I was always surrounded by music. I started playing the acoustic guitar when I was 13,” Alvarado explained.

Alvarado attributes his love and passion for woodworking to all of the time that he and his father spent building model airplanes together. “When I was a kid, my dad and I started making model airplanes, like remote control airplanes,” Alvarado said. “We started building those from scratch out of balsa wood. I just became completely obsessed with it, which I think was the seed of me learning that I love to make things.”

At age 18, Alvarado joined the military, in which he served for eight years. Upon completing his military service, he returned home and has been performing and handcrafting his own guitars ever since.

Alvarado’s career as a luthier took off in a rather unexpected way. In his free time, Alvarado was only making guitars for his personal use, with no intention of selling them. However, as people attended his gigs along the Coast, they began to notice and admire the quality and sound of his beautiful handcrafted guitars.

“[When playing live,] people talk to you while you’re on break, which then leads to ‘Hey, I heard you build guitars.’ Then people start purchasing guitars from me,” he explained. “It organically went from me building my acoustic guitars just for fun, to ‘Okay, I’ve got somebody who I’m building a guitar for.’ Then, the next thing I know, I’ve got a one-year, two-year, three-year waitlist.”

The Driftwood Guitars waitlist is still years long to this day, and people are more than willing to wait to get their hands on one of his custom pieces. Each piece requires Alvarado putting in an immense amount of time and labor to build a completed guitar.

The wait time is due to the immense amount of time and labor that Alvarado puts into each piece.

“I spend four to six months hand making every acoustic guitar. My laser focus from the first moment that I put a chisel to a piece of wood is to make the most incredible sounding guitar that a particular piece of wood will allow me to make. That’s my overall mission statement,” Alvarado said.

When first starting on a piece, Alvardo turns to nature to serve as his guide, for both the woods he uses and the beautiful nature-filled imagery of the 30A area. “I kind of let the guitar lead me in a direction creatively,” he explained. “It’s the wild grain on the wood and what that imagery gives me. A lot of the time I’ll pull from nature, you know, living where we live, whether it’s the beach, or even the cypress tree.”

Each guitar Alvarado makes is unique and intricate in its own way. Each customer who purchases one of his guitars receives a completely customized piece. When a customer places an order, he takes the time to get to know the guitar’s future owner so that he can craft a guitar to best suit them. Alvarado also interviews the customer to figure out the specifics of what they are looking for.

“I make it even more specific when I’m making it for a customer. Part of the interview process is what kind of music are you going to play? You know, what’s the life of this guitar gonna be? I even further refine the sound of the guitar to meet the customer’s specifications,” he explained.

One of Alvarado’s favorite pieces that he has done features an inlay that depicts a portrait of Bob Dylan. He created the guitar for a client who loves Bob Dylan and wanted to capture Dylan and his music into a piece. “I found a photograph of Bob Dylan and I really liked it. He was smoking a cigarette and then I added the lyrics to the song, ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, as if it were the smoke coming out of his cigarette and going up the fretboard,” Alvarado described.

From each guitar’s detailed inlays to its exotic woods, Alvarado’s guitars are unmistakably his own. “Unlike other genres of art like painting or sculpting, the customer base [for guitars] expects a certain level of tradition,” he said. “If you veer too far outside of the traditional bounds of what they’re used to seeing, it can either be embraced or rejected. I am definitely one of those acoustic guitar builders that likes to push the limits.”

In addition to making custom guitars, Alvarado dedicates some of his time to sharing his craft and releasing educational content on his Youtube channel, youtube.com/@DriftwoodGuitars.

Alvarado’s long-time friend and fellow guitar craftsman, Matt Miller, joins him in many of these videos. Miller has a background in engineering and a love for music, so Alvarado brought him onto the Driftwood Guitars team to help him build electric guitars. Together, the two post videos on Youtube to share their guitar-building techniques, tips and a behind-thescenes look into Driftwood Guitars.

You can also find Alvarado’s work online at driftwoodguitars.com, on Instagram at @DriftwoodGuitars, and on Facebook at Driftwood Guitars. If you are interested in having a custom guitar made, visit driftwoodguitars.com.