From his heart to his hands, Gabriel Tenorio is always making music.

“I can’t stop hearing it,” he said. “I can’t stop hearing my memories.”

For as long as he can remember, the Boyle Heights native has been surrounded by music.

“My grandfather played guitar, my grandmother sang, my uncle played rock-and-roll piano,” he explained. “Sadly, my hands kind of like stopped working for guitar. I reached 40 and I really can’t really play professionally anymore.”

But lucky for the longtime musician, somewhere along his musical journey, he picked up quite the unique skill: how to make guitar strings, the old fashioned way, from one of the best.

“Francisco Gonzalez, Frank Gonzalez, the founder of Los Lobos,” he said. “I played guitar in his shop and he gets on this machine and he just starts making strings and I’m putting them on. And one by one, the guitar is coming alive.”

It was the beginning of what has become Tenorio’s second act.

About a decade ago, he opened up his own shop, The Gabriel Tenorio String Company, slowly building trust with fellow musicians, who quickly learned that there’s just something about Tenorio’s strings that just stand out.

“I spin the machine at about 7200 rpm, and so the wires are going through my fingers in my hands. It’s hot, it’s burning, it’s cutting,” he said. “Nobody makes them the way I do, except maybe a couple of folks in Europe. And even then, I have my own proprietary formulas.”

It’s been a winning formula.

Several of Tenorio’s clients have gone on to record Grammy Award-winning songs and albums using his strings.

He makes them all by hand in his small Boyle Heights garage.

“I put on all my packages, ‘Handcrafted by Gabriel Tenorio in Boyle Heights,’ and not East LA, and not LA, not California. Because I really want to say, look, this is a beautiful place,” he said.

From playing songs to creating the very thing it takes to play a song, for Tenorio, it’s all part of the same goal — to make music.

“All I’m trying to do is make a string that’s so responsive to you that you don’t think about it. You don’t work too hard. If you’re not worried about it, you’re making music, right?”