For Many Musicians, He’s the Master at Pulling Strings

William Tapia hunched over a cracked cello, his brown eyes intently gazing through tortoise-shell glasses into the 80-year-old instrument’s hollow belly.

“It’s like open-heart surgery when you pull the top off,” said Tapia, who has been repairing and restoring string instruments in Monrovia for 30 years. “It’s a very delicate process.”

Sensitive to his customers’ concerns over their beloved instruments, Tapia encourages clients to visit his modest Foothill Boulevard shop while their guitars, violins and cellos are being restored.

“My customers trust me,” said Tapia, 65. “For them, it’s like depositing a child with me.”

David Barnett, an Arcadia rabbi, has entrusted his violin to Tapia for about a year. He is having the neck of the instrument, which was made in the 1700s, realigned.

“He works very carefully and methodically,” Barnett said. “His type of craftsman is a vanishing breed.”

For Tapia, it is love for the instruments and reverence for the masters who made them that have marked his career as a luthier, a craftsman who makes, repairs and restores string instruments.

“This is a very anonymous kind of work,” said Tapia, who manages to come across as both proud and modest at once. “The person who makes the instrument has his label on it and is remembered in posterity. The restorer is unknown.

“You have to love what you do because there is no recognition,” he continued. “I love to bring back to life the instruments of the masters.”

In his workshop, Tapia spends his days alone. Spread across the floor are a jumble of instrument cases. Bows hang from a wire running along one wall, like socks on a clothesline, waiting to be repaired. A small work space is set aside for the restoration and repair of violins. A larger area is allocated for guitars and cellos.

Tapia’s specialty is restoring bows. He strings them with rare white Mongolian horsehair that costs $650 a pound.

Each year, Tapia spends about 240 hours making one guitar from scratch. “It is the least part of what I do,” he said, rubbing his salt-and-pepper beard. “I really don’t have the ego of an instrument maker. You have to feel that you are making a Stradivarius. Otherwise, why do it?”

Being one of the best at what he does matters to Tapia. After three decades as a luthier, he continues to attend workshops and seminars to hone his skills. He also spent two years in Spain as an apprentice to Jose Ramirez, a world-class guitar maker.

In fact, one of Tapia’s most famous customers, the late Andres Segovia, would only play a Ramirez guitar.

One day, when Segovia was preparing for an appearance at the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, the weather began to affect the way his instrument sounded. The discordance was slight, but to Segovia’s ear, it was intolerable.

So Tapia was summoned to the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. At first, Segovia requested that Tapia scour the city and find him another Ramirez guitar.

“I closed shop and my wife and I drove all over Los Angeles,” Tapia recalled. “We arrived at the hotel like Gypsies, carrying all these guitars.”

Tapia then sat in Segovia’s hotel room restringing the borrowed guitars with a brand of strings that Segovia preferred. Then, one by one, the maestro played each guitar. One by one, he rejected them.

“After playing them all he said to me: ‘Mr. Tapia, last year the Pope gave a private Mass for me, my wife and my 16-year-old son. Then I played for him and the Pope blessed my guitar. This is the guitar I want to play.”’

Without another word, Tapia went to work, using Segovia’s bed as a makeshift work bench. It took all day, but he repaired the guitar for what was to be the 94-year-old artist’s final performance.

Most of Tapia’s days are less eventful, but rarely are they less gratifying.

“I work 60 hours a week,” he said. “And I don’t remember one single moment where I begrudged coming to work.”