Stringing Together the Story: The History of Tangled String Studios

By Abigail Harrison, DHI Communications Coordinator

When words fail, music speaks, and six strings can tell a powerful story.

Danny Davis is the owner of Tangled String Studios, but he’s better known for his masterfully designed and hand-crafted guitars. However, just like each guitar he creates, Davis has a unique story behind how he became the established artist and business owner he is today.

Davis has been playing guitar since he was eight years old, when, just by luck, a lady who taught guitar lessons lived across the street from him and introduced him to a new passion. He kept playing throughout high school, and his talent won him talent shows and attention from girls. In fact, his guitar skills were how he managed to woo and marry his high school sweetheart.

Davis moved to Huntsville in 1983 to pursue an engineering career at NASA. Still new to the city, he and his wife started having children, and that meant there wasn’t a lot of extra spending money in the bank.

“We were pretty broke, and my guitar was broken. And it was just not in the budget for me to buy a new guitar. So I said, ‘Well, I bet I can make one!’ So, I had some tools, and I bought a book called How to Build Your Own Guitar, and it had a place to get some resources. And that’s how I started making guitars,” Davis said.

Several years later, Davis was coming up on the end of his career at NASA and was starting to plan his life after retirement. By then, Davis had built many guitars as side projects, and he had a special plan in mind:

“When I was thinking about what I was gonna do when I retired, it wasn't really a mystery. I said, ‘I am gonna find a place to build guitars.’”

At the same time, his son, who is also a musician, was looking for a place to record albums with his band. They looked at several facilities before discovering an old warehouse space in Lowe Mill, and they immediately knew that they found exactly what they were looking for. In 2011, Tangled String Studios was established, but it was a long way from perfect.

“We came in and started changing the place, building it out. The first thing we did was put the shop together, so we could build things. And then we put his studio together so that he could record, and we and our friends were here quite a bit, so we started putting in couches that we found on the side of the road,” Davis said. “It just became so evident that this was not going to be short term, that we needed to make long term investments in the place because it really was special from early on.”

In its early days, Tangled String Studios was a revolving door for recording artists, but eventually all of the contracts ran out, and they were left looking for ways to bring in more business. Someone brought up the idea of using the store to host house concerts, and that’s when the magic happened.

“Eventually, the venue took over all the guitar space, so we rented the room next door and flipped it. And it got to where the whole room was the venue,” Davis said. “But then COVID hit, and we lost that business and kind of reversed everything. We took the main room and turned it back into the guitar shop and showroom.”

When COVID made it impossible for performers to take the stage at Tangled String Studios, Davis turned to what he knew best- making guitars. He applied the principles he learned at NASA to develop a three step approach to designing instruments, all while keeping the customer’s personality at the center of the design.

“So when I'm looking at a customer, I'm not building a guitar, I'm building their guitar. And the bottom line is, I want to evoke some kind of feeling, some kind of emotion, whenever that person picks up their guitar,” Davis said.

The first step he focuses on is making sure the guitar sounds good. A lot of craftsmanship goes into making sure all the materials are cut and assembled correctly to create a perfect sound. To ensure he accomplishes this step, Davis conducts tests to measure frequencies and vibrations, which is a technique he learned from doing modal tests on spacecrafts at NASA.

The second step is making sure the guitar feels good. The most important part is making sure the neck of the guitar feels good because that is the main part the musician touches while playing the instrument. Davis also applies concepts of geometry to ensure all of the strings are perfectly angled and aligned.

The last step is making sure the guitar looks good. Each customer that Davis works with has a unique vision for his or her instrument, and he wants to bring that vision to life as accurately and beautifully as possible.

Davis has built many personalized guitars that each have a special story to them, but there is one specific guitar that sticks with him.

“One of my favorites is back in 2016. We had a Concert on the Dock, and then these two people came in because it was hot outside. And they just sat on the couches and I was the only one in here working on my guitars. It was probably about eight o'clock. They were on the couch talking, and then a little bit later, he was playing guitar. I sat down to play guitar with him for a little bit, but little did I know that was their second date,” Davis said.

In 2021, the woman from that couple came back to the store to commission Davis to build a guitar for her now-fiance as a wedding day present. She said that they had such a great time in Tangled String Studios on their second date that the memory always stuck with them.

“She brought in a whole binder full of memorabilia. I noticed there was this really beautiful photo of them in front of one of those yellow ginkgo trees. There were gingko leaves pressed in some of the cards, so I used a golden brass wire to make what looks like a wedding with the gingko leaves. I made the guitar blue for something borrowed. And then dragonflies were another feature, so I put some dragonflies on it, and finally his initials somewhere on the top. And it just turned out so special and so pretty,” Davis said.

What’s even more special to Davis is that he also gets to create custom guitars for his loved ones. His son has never owned a store-bought guitar and has only played one designed by him. Davis recently began a new tradition of gifting his grandchildren a hand-crafted guitar when they turn ten years old.

‘‘It’s really meaningful that I get to do that for my family,” Davis said.

Tangled String Studios is located in Lowe Mill at 2211 Seminole Drive Southwest, Huntsville, AL, 35805. They are open Wednesday-Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. More information can be found at http://www.tangledstringstudios.com/.