Durango’s place to find guitar strings when the ill-timed snap occurs is moving to the 1200 block of Main Avenue.
“We’ll be across from Buckley Park, and with all the music that goes on there, I couldn’t ask for a better location,” said Jim Gillaspy, owner of Jimmy’s Music & Supply.
Gillaspy, a former owner of Katzin Music & Studios, which operated in Durango for almost 40 years, opened Jimmy’s Music & Supply in July 2018.
After the closure of Katzin left local musicians with no place to buy a capo, to replace guitar strings or to buy a piano method book, opening a smaller music store made sense, Gillaspy said.
The focus of Jimmy’s is on supplies and accoutrements for instruments, principally focusing on guitars and keyboards.
Katzin Music & Studio provided an array of new instruments for music lovers around the Four Corners, but it found that market dissolving from online competition.
Jimmy’s will confine new instruments sales to acoustic guitars and ukuleles from Teton and Yamaha keyboards.
Gillaspy said guitars and keyboards are the exceptions to the loss of new instrument sales, once the bread and butter of small music stores, to online sales.
The old store was located at East Second Avenue and east 15th Street, and moving to Main Avenue means Jimmy’s will carry more items like earbuds and other consumer electronics for tourists who forgot to pack theirs.
The store will also offer cords and other electronics for amplifiers.
A consignment service is offered for people who have their old band instrument gathering dust in the closet. Jimmy’s will take 30% of the sale price and the owner gets 70%.
“I’m really surprised by the quality of instruments in peoples’ closets and under their beds,” he said. “I think it helps everyone to know that a once-prized item will go to a good home locally.”
Amplifiers and electronic guitars are also staples of consignment sales.
Gillaspy has spent the last three months renovating his new 2,000-square-foot space at 1239 Main Ave. The shop is about double the size of the old store.
“It was nine offices that had to be demolished, and the build out was long and arduous, but it’s fresh. It doesn’t look like it’s from the 1970s with a little 1980s paint job,” he said.
The soft opening of the new location took place Wednesday. The new location will be open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Saturday.
parmijo@durangoherald.com
