Past the pants, shirts and other clothes hanging up.

Way to the back of his master bedroom walk-in closet, Robert Sharpe set up a nifty little guitar workshop.

There, atop a wooden bench, Sharpe repairs, customizes and tweaks guitars with a scientist’s precision and shredder’s savvy.

A chemist by trade, after working on his own guitars for several years, he started a part-time guitar repair business in fall 2021. Due to his skill and quick turnarounds, Sharpe’s amassed a growing clientele of local Huntsville musicians, including members of Camacho, one of the city’s best up-and-coming rock bands.

Over the decades, Huntsville musicians’ go-to’s for guitar repair have included local legend Tom Shepard and longtime Fret Shop ace Brian Dawson. With Shepard approaching retirement age and Dawson moved on vocationally, there’s a need for a young gun to learn the old ways. Most local musicians would rather support a local guitar repairman instead of the big-box music-store chain.

Enter, the 33-year-old Sharpe. The Meridianville native started playing guitar back in middle school, learning alongside his older brother. Initially, the music of modern-rock band Incubus inspired Sharpe to learn guitar. Later, he grew interested in classic guitarists like Jimi Hendrix. Sharpe also played worship music on guitar at church.

Eventually, he wanted to learn how to fix and modify his guitars when they needed it, instead of taking them into a local music store. Over a six-year period, Sharpe taught himself guitar repair via YouTube videos, social media groups and online forums.

He started with simple things, like adjusting the action (string height off the neck) on his Paul Reed Smith brand guitars. Eventually he moved up to more complicated tasks, like swapping pickups, the parts that convert string vibrations into electric signals, and truss-rod adjustments, which straighten a guitar’s neck.

At first, he just worked on his own guitars. “And as I grew in confidence and became extremely comfortable with modifying my own instruments,” Sharpe says, “so then grew my confidence on my ability to help other people get their guitars playing exactly the way that they wanted.”

Sharpe has a PhD in organic chemistry. By day, he’s a process development scientist at BASF. An innate curiosity and desire for experimentation also bleeds into his side hustle.

“How can I do X, Y, and Z and get the guitar playing the way I want it to?” Sharpe says. “And just thinking about what those possibilities are.”

His main guitar repair tools include a soldering iron, Allen wrenches, screwdrivers, files and power drill.

Sharpe collects effect pedals, the stomp-boxes many guitarists use to color their sound. He first made the leap into repairing guitars for other musicians in order to fund the purchase of a pedal he wanted.

Local alternative-rock musician Adam Renfro first heard about Sharpe’s guitar work via a Facebook post. Turns out they’d both attended Hazel Green High School at the same time.

Renfro was having issues with his 1998 Fender Stratocaster. Sharpe fixed the intonation, filed down some the frets on the neck and tightened up input jack.

When Renfro got the guitar back, “It made all the difference,” he says. “It played like butter.” Renfro plays the Strat on his original songs like “Bang Bang.”

Renfro told his musician friends about how happy he was with Sharpe’s work. Renfro had other instruments worked on too, including a bass and acoustic guitar. Sharpe also built a guitar effects pedalboard, which organizes and optimizes stomp-boxes, for him.

Sharpe’s business took off from there. “Everybody started taking their gear to him,” Renfro said. “Huntsville is growing, and we need this kind of level of repair in town. Because there’s so many musicians in town like that are just, like, thriving to play and want to have a good guitar.”

Taylor Burton, singer/guitarist with folk-rock band The Silver Silos, first heard about Sharpe via a local musicians’ Facebook group. Burton arranged to have his ‘90s Guild acoustic guitar worked on. The Guild’s binding, the trimming on a guitar’s top edges, was coming loose.

The issue was beyond cosmetic. Burton, who’s 39, plays seated. At gigs the Guild acoustic, which is his main instrument live, was slipping around on him. The part that sits on his leg when he strums his band’s songs, such as “Headline News.”

“The job at hand was to stabilize it [the binding],” Burton says, “and get it so that I wouldn’t be worrying about it while I was playing. Because I play indoor and outdoor gigs, and, you know, summertime Alabama humidity is not kind on instruments.”

As any working musician will tell you, instrument repair is a vital spoke in the local wheel. If you’re playing a lot, your gear’s eventually going to break down, whether that’s a minor thing (like a noisy input jack) or something more serious (like a neck issue).

If your guitar’s on the fritz and you have shows coming up, that’s a problem. Burton says, “It’s very much like an auto mechanic keeping a car on the road.”

Sharpe doesn’t have illusions about doing guitar repair fulltime. He’s got a great day-job that provides excellent medical benefits for his family.

Still, guitar repair’s a fulfilling outlet. (Sharpe’s other interests include video-games and long-distance running.) He and wife Alden Sharpe have two young kids. “The idea of me going out to a concert on a Friday night is really not a possibility for us right now,” Sharpe says. “And so as I’ve sort of grown into this role, it has given me a very cool way to sort of vicariously experience the local music scene.”

In addition to working on guitars, Sharpe’s also built a few from parts. Eventually, he’d like to add amplifier repair to his skillset. He’s already programming digital amp modelers, which do strikingly accurate replications of classic amp tones, for clients. “Digital modeling,” Sharpe says, “has become important in this space, both for convenience, price and broad availability.”

Some of his most rewarding work? Getting an affordable guitar to play as nicely as much more expensive guitar. He also loves to see guitars that’ve been on his workbench later turn up in local bands’ social media videos.

Then there’s tone-chasing. Helping a guitarist finally conjure from their instrument what they’ve previously only been able to imagine. As Renfro puts it, “I can really be creative on this thing now.”

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