From his heart to his hands, Gabriel Tenorio is always making music.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t stop hearing it,\u201d he said. \u201cI can\u2019t stop hearing my memories.\u201d<\/p>\n
For as long as he can remember, the Boyle Heights native has been surrounded by music.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy grandfather played guitar, my grandmother sang, my uncle played rock-and-roll piano,\u201d he explained. \u201cSadly, my hands kind of like stopped working for guitar. I reached 40 and I really can’t really play professionally anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrancisco Gonzalez, Frank Gonzalez, the founder of Los Lobos,\u201d he said. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was the beginning of what has become Tenorio\u2019s second act.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s just something about Tenorio\u2019s strings that just stand out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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,\u201d he said. \u201cNobody makes them the way I do, except maybe a couple of folks in Europe. And even then, I have my own proprietary formulas.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been a winning formula.<\/p>\n
Several of Tenorio\u2019s clients have gone on to record Grammy Award-winning songs and albums using his strings.<\/p>\n
He makes them all by hand in his small Boyle Heights garage.<\/p>\n
\u201cI put on all my packages, \u2018Handcrafted by Gabriel Tenorio in Boyle Heights,\u2019 and not East LA, and not LA, not California. Because I really want to say, look, this is a beautiful place,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
From playing songs to creating the very thing it takes to play a song, for Tenorio, it\u2019s all part of the same goal \u2014 to make music.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll 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?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From his heart to his hands, Gabriel Tenorio is always making music. \u201cI can\u2019t stop hearing it,\u201d he…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":290870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[8624,1582,276,101743,2961,224,5337],"class_list":{"0":"post-290869","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-boyle-heights","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-hispanic-heritage-month","12":"tag-la","13":"tag-los-angeles","14":"tag-losangeles"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115347637165010012","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}