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Guitar Technician Bill Richardson makes adjustments to a guitar in his workshop in Nob Hill. "I keep musicians going," he said. Richardson retired to Albuquerque three years ago and continued to repair guitars as a hobby. Word of mouth escalated his hobby into a full-scale business. "I talk to my customers with a little bit of knowledge and they sigh with relief."

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They all made it look so easy, those guitar gods named Hendrix, Richards, Page, and Townshend.

Bill Richardson was a Jimi Hendrix fan. He figured if he just learned the mechanics of the instrument - how the sum of its parts interact to make mind-blowing rock 'n'roll - that he, too, would be able to make mind-blowing rock 'n'roll.

That wasn't necessarily the case.

"It was too hard for me to learn how to play guitar," said Richardson, a guitar technician and owner of Studio Guitar in Nob Hill. "I wanted to be good. Really good. But I had no patience."

He was, however, really good at something else: fixing things.

Richardson, 51, has combined his love of music and inherited fix-it skills into a long career as a guitar technician, spending three decades either on the road touring or in a shop fine-tuning the axes of musicians as diverse as Bonnie Raitt, Chris Isaak and Al Hurricane.

It's work that makes him the musician's version of a reliable mechanic: A trusty adviser on how to use and maintain a coveted piece of equipment.

"My whole job is to push you wherever you want to go as a musician," Richardson said from his warehouse-like, by-appointment-only guitar repair and restoration business at 106 Morningside Drive N.E. "As a mechanic, you're really there as a servant."

Practice makes perfect

Industry-wide, the jobs of making and repairing guitars are inextricably linked.

Richardson makes guitars. He repairs guitars. He restores guitars.

It's all made possible by years, if not decades, of tinkering - the guitar tech's on-the-job training.

"If you really love the idea of setting up your own guitars, it's trial and error," said Rick Pimentel, president of Pimentel and Sons Guitar Makers, Inc., which has made and repaired guitars since 1951 and has been headquartered in Albuquerque since 1963.

"You take 10 guitars, you look at them all, you play them all, you get the feel of all of them."

For Richardson, that work began in the late 1960s in upstate New York, around the same time Hendrix was using a Fender Stratocaster to recast the limits of the electric guitar.

Richardson - who wears a Stratocaster tattoo on his forearm - said the famous guitars were readily available to him then at costs much lower than they would be today.

"They weren't `vintage.' They were `used,'" he said. "I'd get two or three to try against each other."

Richardson learned the instruments through reverse engineering them; examining the parts as a way of finding the source of the problem.

He would then hang out with bands in the Buffalo area, searching for top guitarists who could "test drive" the guitars for him. It was a way for him to hone his skills by watching how every-day rockers use the instrument. That has continued throughout his career, as he has sought conversations with legends like Pete Townshend of The Who to continue his guitar education.

He later moved to California, where he spent 20 years fixing and building guitars, including more than a decade at renowned Palo Alto, Calif., repair shop Gryphen Stringed Instruments, where he ran the company's vintage guitar repair shop, he said.

Richardson has also worked as part of the touring crew for musicians like Chris Isaak, whom he toured with in 1999 and 2000.

He retired to New Mexico of December 2002, continuing to tinker with guitars until word-of-mouth brought him back into business.

Hard to start?

Richardson acknowledges that today's guitar-techs-in-waiting wouldn't likely be able to absorb the expense of tinkering with several Stratocasters today.

The guitars are expensive. And tearing them apart for the sake of tinkering becomes harder to justify.

But there are other ways of learning, he and others said.

The Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery, for example, is a 35-year-old guitar repair school in Phoenix that trains about 70 prospective guitar builders and repair workers a year, said Kris Olsen, the school's placement director and electric guitar construction instructor.

Each of the students vying for a "certificate in the art of luthiery" follows a curriculum that includes building both an acoustic and electric guitar, while spending a third of their time studying repair and restoration.

More than just handymen-in-training, the students learn elements of music, woodworking, and electrical work as part of their studies, he said.

"It really combines a lot of different disciplines into one," Olsen said. "It's a discipline I can teach a student in five months and it takes them the rest of their lifetime learning about it. It's an infinite body of knowledge."

Inherited skills

Richardson's father was a race car mechanic. When encountered with a car that needed fixing, he'd first ask the driver if he could ride along.

"He'd say, `I have to get in your car and hear you drive,'" Richardson said. "The deciding factor wasn't always the car, but the driver."

Richardson has applied that same principle to working with musicians. He said about 25 percent of his work is just consulting.

One recent customer, he said, came into his shop complaining of a rattle in his guitar. After watching the guitarist play, Richardson concluded that the rattle came from the guitarist pulling the guitar too close to his body.

Richardson's work includes everything from repairing a guitar's broken neck to mending the effects New Mexico's arid climate has on wooden instruments.

He also restores instruments, like the mandolin dating back to the late 1800s he was restoring for a family from New York.

Musicians, Richardson said, can be beyond frustration when they bring their instrument to him.

Others may be insecure, he said, assuming he's a top-notch player himself.

He does play. He just doesn't want that to be a focal point.

After all, he's working for them.

"I play. I just downplay my abilities. I don't want to be a competitor," he said. "I'm on their side, pretty much from the get-go."