Chuck Morrison knows that owning a guitar store is unlikely to be a lucrative enterprise. But he said making music has been an integral part of being human for tens of thousands of years, so he decided to open one anyway.

CF Morrison Guitars has been open since January and has relied on word of mouth for local community response, having sold some guitars and repaired several of them so far, Morrison said.

Pandemic fiscal challenges caused the only two music stores to close down in the Pullman/Moscow area and there weren’t any left.

“Since no one else stepped up to fill the void, I decided to give it a go,” Morrison said. 

The store has been open since January and has relied on word of mouth for local community response, having sold some guitars and repaired several of them so far, he said.

The mission of the store is twofold: a good store for local musicians and students of music and to expose them to higher quality instruments and give them an opportunity to play and own them.

“You shouldn’t have to buy an instrument sight unseen,” Morrison said. 

Morrison has played the guitar since the age of ten and began professionally building them in 1974, he said. He performed solo, in bands and taught privately as well as at a college in Vermont.

Having started the Flatiron Mandolin company and built several hundred guitars that sold nationally and internationally, Morrison believed that he had the credentials to open a music store.

The store is in a small and comfortable setting, a personal space surrounded by guitars strings and wood, Morrison said. 

Initially, the store just had the guitars Morrison himself built along with a collection of strings. However, Morrison recently added two new lines of less expensive decent quality imported guitars, Cordoba for classical guitars and Guild for acoustic and electric guitars, he said. 

Morrison said he resets the action on all those instruments in order to make them easier to play. 

“I spent a lot of years researching how to make guitars louder and more responsive,” Morrison said. 

He has allowed himself to keep the guitars he built that either impressed him or were built for his research, Morrison said. Most of those instruments were experiments that proved or disproved certain concepts that he was testing. 

“[Music] is one of the things that makes life worth living and needs to be nurtured.” Morrison said.

Morrison hopes the store can be a resource for professional, amateur and student musicians, inspire others to take up music and eventually inspire some competition in the area.