Gelb Music — Local services in Redwood City

Selection is really good. Nice instruments, And I like the atmosphere. A classic old store, kinda historic. A little pricey (for this I blame the insanity of real estate in the area, not them). Some music store staff are great. Some are typical. I have found that music store workers are mostly of two varieties: the typical kind, who tend to have this undercurrent of rather sexist, judgmental pressure, and those who just love to connect people of all kinds to what they need. Sigh - this place has both. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of the typical kind in this world, and female (or otherwise not “Rock Star” types) really feel it. It is like they somehow need to prove that they are more knowledgeable than me, or something. Very tiring. I want to tell them, “look, I know you wanted to be a professional performer and it feels degrading to be working in a music store, and that you feel like selling stuff to female musicians makes you feel even further from your standards of your own self-image. But you really need to heal that, not surround yourself with a bubble of asserted wannabe dominance. It is not helping you at all. this is actually a really cool .” To be fair, I only really got this attitude a little here, and it was pretty subtle (but there). Everyone else has been fine. But even a little makes it hard to want to come back. I think music store owners need to screen this, and train people out of it. Or better yet, hire some good female staff. But I do come back, because the location is good and they have good stuff and they are historic and small. I like them overall. And it is very rare to find places that do not have that phenomenon. So they are not losing my business any time soon. I just hope that one issue gets fixed....

I recently purchased a very special amp from Blues City Music. I had a lot of questions about the function and use of this amp. As this amp was advertised on Reverb, my customer service rep likely was getting many tire kickers. The amp I purchased, a Diesel VH4, is a unicorn amp (hard to find, expensive). In a world of Key board commandos who spend their lives making customer service people live's miserable, I half expected a pessimistic response to my questions. In fact, on Reverb there were a number of Diesel VH4's for sale. As part of my do diligence, I reached out to a number of sellers whose attitude seemed to be "buy it, or leave me alone". This WAS NOT the case with Blues City Music. They took time to answer my questions, reassured me on ease of use and function and made me comfortable spending a lot of my hard earned money. After the sale they immediately shipped my amp and communicated tacking number details to me. Over the course of a few days i watched my package via tacking number cross the Untied States. It acctually arrived a day earlier than expected which was a pleasant surprise. Upon arrival I could tell that Blues City Guitar had packaged my amp with care confirmed when I opened the box and my amp was in perfect condition. I rarely write these reviews as people use reviews to bully retailers but do to the experiences I had tracking down this make and model of amp and the people retailing them i had to acknowledge the effort and ease of doing business with this company. I highly recommend Blues City music and would do business...

As someone who has been going to Gelb since I was a teenager all I have to say is "Please make it go away".

What was once a well known piece of the music community of the bay area has become totally useless. What was once a family of musicians active in the local music scene is now the Kmart of music stores, disorganized...impersonal...just another guitar store.

A couple of weeks ago I went there to get a couple of packs of strings and they couldn't find them???

Today I went in to see if they had a couple of guitar boxes to ship a guitar I was selling, in the past the response was sure how many do you need, today the response was "We sell them for $15", if they had said 5$ sure but $15? what exactly am I paying for? your stellar customer service?

Since the change this place has steadily gone downhill, please just let it go, make it go away, or at least change the name so you aren't tarnishing the name of what was once an institution of the bay area...