McCabe’s Guitar Shop has been a little hard to explain since 1958.
It is, technically, a music store. There are guitars, ukuleles, banjos, mandolins, dulcimers, fiddles, bouzoukis, sitars, ouds, strings, picks, straps, cases, books, oddities, necessities, and things you didn’t know you needed until you picked them up.
But McCabe’s has never been only a store.
It is also a repair shop, where instruments come in buzzing, cracking, slipping, rattling, wheezing, or otherwise complaining, and leave with a better chance at a useful life.
It is a music school, where beginners become players, players become better players, and returning players remember why they started in the first place.
And, on the right nights, it is a concert room where songs do not have to compete with much besides the sound of the room and the attention of the people in it.
For decades, McCabe’s has been a place to buy an instrument, learn it, fix it, hear what it can do, and talk with people who care about all of the above. That has always been the point. Not polish. Not spectacle. Just music, passed from hand to hand.
You’ll find us on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, still doing the same impractical and necessary thing: helping people make music.
We have rentals for the cautious, lessons for the eager, truth-telling for the fearful, repairs for the clumsy, concerts for the devoted, and free coffee for all.
Come Strum With Us
Open daily 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
310.828.4497
mccabes@mccabes.com
You’ll find us on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, about 10 minutes from the Santa Monica Pier.
For the map-inclined:
34 º 01.63 North, 118 º 27.45 West
Drop by if you need strings, a setup, a lesson, a ticket, an instrument, advice you may or may not have asked for, or simply a few minutes among sympathetic wooden objects.