Shoreline Music • About

Guitarists
Muriel Anderson
Pierre Bensusan
Howard Emerson
Jaquie Gipson
Dougie MacLean
Franco Morone
The Waybacks

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Shoreline Music is a store and website run by musicians for musicians (on the left that's me, John, owner of this shop, seen playing 15 years ago at St. Michael's Alley in Palo Alto). We have a passion for the instruments we sell and for the music that can be made on them. It is this joy for the enterprise of making music that continues to make Shoreline the premiere location on the web for handcrafted guitars and all the best accessories. (for a more detailed history of our store, click here)

Beyond selling guitars and accessories, we love to talk shop. If you just have questions about where to go to hear great acoustic acts, or perhaps you're looking for some good tab arrangements of your favorite guitarist, by all means, contact us and we'll talk.

A lot of music stores carry a long list of products just to expand their inventory. But at Shoreline, we actually use the gear we sell. We own the instruments we sell, and we amplify them onstage using the pickups we sell. We plug into the amps we sell, using the cables we sell. We string our guitars with the strings we sell. We tune our guitars with the tuners we sell. As a guitarist, I know what it's like to buy gear from a sales guy who can quote from a manufacturer's catalog and give you a good price, but who has no sense of what it's like to actually hold and use a guitar onstage--in the online music world, there's a lot of dealers like this. But I've always preferred to talk instead to people who have an organic sense of what makes an instrument unique, and that is the groove I try to bring to this store. Moreover, no product makes it into our shop unless I've tried it and liked it (I've turned away many manufacturers and builders), so you can trust that whatever you get from us, you're going to like it, too.

Shoreline has spent over a decade on the web building a reputation for superlative customer service. This is no accident. It's our policy to get you great guitars and guitar-related stuff as inexpensively and easily as possible, and we make sure you're completely happy with what you've bought. So, to that end, here's what we do:

Satisfaction Guarantee - This one's easy. If you don't like it, send it back within 10 days, and we'll refund your money, and we won't charge you any "restocking" fees (what are those things, anyway?). Many stores have return policies similar to ours, but they don't let you return the gear if it has been opened, used or installed. But what good is that? How can you tell if you like a pickup, amp, or guitar if you don't actually get to try it out? When you order a pickup from us, put it in and try it out for a couple of gigs--if you don't like it, we'll either refund your money or let you try a different one. Same thing goes for strings, preamps, you name it. Of course, this guarantee doesn't just count for inexpensive items. It also covers every guitar we sell, including used guitars, Dutch Auction guitars, new guitars--even custom guitars. Yes, you read that right. Every custom-built guitar we sell is covered by our 10-day trial and money-back guarantee. If you've just spent $3000 on your dream guitar, you want it to be great. We want it to be great. But if you're not happy for whatever reason, just send it back. We'll gladly refund your cost. All we ask is that you treat it nicely in the interim. (you can get more details on our Guarantee page)

Pricing - Buying guitar gear shouldn't have to be like a poker game. That's why, wherever possible, we plainly quote our prices on everything we sell. Does this mean that occasionally some folks will use our low prices to leverage even better deals at other stores? Probably. But I suspect most visitors to our store will appreciate our unusual pricing candor. Plus, while browsing here, you'll never run across screaming red headlines with lots of exclamation points telling you about our latest sales. That's because we don't have them (exclamation points or sales). We'd just rather give you the low prices all the time--in fact, for virtually everything we carry, you won't find a lower delivered price published elsewhere. Of course, if you look hard enough, you may run across stores that don't offer free shipping but do offer prices that seem lower at first glance--many stores, in fact, set their prices exactly one cent or one dollar below ours. However, when they ask you to pay $6.95 shipping on a $5.00 set of strings, their prices don't seem so low anymore. You'll therefore have to look a whole lot harder to find anything like our unique combination of across-the-board free shipping and no-questions-asked unconditional guarantee.

Expertise - Between the guys who work in this shop, we have over 60 years of combined stage experience. This means that when you call our shop, you'll find something that is a rarity in the internet guitar business: Someone who actually knows what on earth he's talking about. We've played lots of different instruments with lots of different pickups through lots of different amps in lots of different rooms. And we have, of course, sold thousands of pickups and preamps, too. This is why Shoreline is widely regarded as the authority on amplifying acoustic instruments. In fact, we regularly get calls from folks asking us how to use the gear they've purchased at other stores. So whether you're looking to plug in for the first time or the hundredth time, you can trust that we'll be able to steer you in the right direction.

Ordering - All you have to do to buy something here at Shoreline is click on the "Buy Now" buttons scattered throughout our product pages. Our shopping cart is fast, easy to use, and fully secure (128-bit SSL3 encryption). We'll never force you to create an account or join a mailing list just to order something, and we accept most major forms of payment, including American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, PayPal, money order, and check.

Shipping - Here's our shipping policy: Anywhere in the US, for any product you buy from us, shipping is free. Customers keep asking us if our free shipping is some sort of promotion or special offer. Well, it is indeed special--it's almost impossible to find standard free shipping on the web anymore--but this is our regular, everyday policy. No coupons, no promo codes, and no minimum purchases. Just free shipping. Even for heavy stuff. Further details can be found on our shipping page.

Privacy - No one hates spam more than we do. For an internet business, unwanted email can be a serious drain on productivity. Knowing how annoying unwanted correspondence can be, our privacy policy is simple: We don't give, sell, loan, or otherwise share any of your personal information with anyone. Ever. No phone numbers, no email addresses, nuthin.