Richard Hoover and Eric Schoenberg | Santa Cruz Guitars

Richard Hoover and Eric Schoenberg reminisce on resurrecting the OM and their 50-plus years around vintage and custom guitars.

October 13, 2025

Santa Cruz Guitars co-founder Richard Hoover and vintage guitar expert/guitar designer Eric Schoenberg have known each other since the 1970s. Having gotten his start by working at Marc Silber’s legendary Fretted Instrument store in New York’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, Eric became known as a fingerstyle guitarist before co-founding the original Cambridge location of The Music Emporium. In the 1980s, Eric created Schoenberg Guitars, which was originally a collaboration with Dana Bourgeois and Martin Guitars that focused on modern interpretations of vintage Martin OMs (today, Schoenberg guitars are built by several individual luthiers according to Eric’s designs). Richard’s vision for creating hand-made interpretations of classic American flattops put Santa Cruz at the forefront of contemporary lutherie, and for the past 50 years, the company has not only created some of the finest steel-string guitars available, it has also influenced every other maker on the scene.

Santa Cruz and Schoenberg Guitars were both instrumental in resurrecting the OM design in the 1970s and ’80s (Martin stopped building OMs in 1934 and didn’t offer any standard OM models until 1993). Richard, along with Peghead Nation co-founders Dan Gabel and Teja Gerken recently visited Eric at his shop, Schoenberg Guitars, in Tiburon, California. Surrounded by some of the finest vintage guitars in existence, the two industry pioneers found themselves catching up on a variety of topics, and in this video, they reminisce about their efforts in creating contemporary OMs.

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