Still At It After All These Years

Things are so nicely relaxed here these days. I’m happily offering great instruments for sale to all my customers, old and new, and the guitar repair and restoration shop is as active as ever and I’m getting to spend quality time with every single person who comes in with an instrument for repairs. Same workshop, on the second floor of that same ol’ building on Bleecker Street, with its own entrance from the street. I have the time to greet everyone personally, which I do truly love to do. With the repair business by appointment (email to info@umanovguitars.com for info), I can give each and every one of you my undivided attention. It’s fun for me too, gets me back to my roots in the early 1960s when I was just the hot guitar repair kid in New York with a small shop, getting to know the needs and personality of every customer.

I get so many emails from long-time customers telling me how much they miss my store, still get these wonderful notes almost every day, despite it now being a little over three years since we closed the doors of that open-to-the-world clubhouse. And it always surprises me to find out, every so often, that some people out there mistakenly think that the entire operation is gone. Well it just ain’t so, not nearly. If anything, there are things that I can now devote the kind of attention to that I hadn't been able to do for decades while, along with everything else, I was concentrating on making the business grow and keeping up with all facets of it. It took a lot more than met the eye to keep that place hopping, and without the wonderful staff that I had I never could have done it.

When it comes to handling each guitar, bass, banjo, whatever, that’s coming in for potential sale via my occasional emailings (contact me at info@umanovguitars.com to be on that mailing list) and on my website, I can now be more focused than ever on getting just the right stuff, and the cool stuff, to offer for your playing pleasure. And it still does come in, great instruments from all of you, old friends and new, and from the occasional sizable collection too. It’s been more than three years now and I’m happier than I ever thought I’d be. I get to do the two things I love most, to be with great people and to work with great fretted instruments, all day, every single day. I'll still get the occasional panicked email or phone call though, from someone who hadn’t been in touch in years, walked by and found that (ulp!) there were no more guitars in the window(!), but they’re as thrilled as I am to find out that, to paraphrase Paul Simon, I’m ”Still at it after all these years”. My thanks to all of you who’ve given me and are still giving me so much to be happy about, every single day.