I take pride in visiting Guitar Center stores all over the nation starting from San Francisco to Hollywood to Las Vegas and all the way to New Hampshire. In fact, I frequent Guitar Center stores like they are national monuments.
Today marked the grand opening for Guitar Center – Emeryville
They closed their El Cerrito store a few days ago. That was a sad day for me because that store was only 2 miles away. Now I have to make a 6 mile journey. My family and I were able to attend their grand opening and we had a ton of fun. They had a great line up of fun and entertainment. In fact, the neighboring stores stayed open to feed off the crowd. Well, more that the crowd fed off of them.
Guitar Center – Emeryville is located at 5925 Shellmound St. in Emeryville. If you are familiar with the area, it is in the Public Market area next to the food courts.
I’ve been waiting for this opening for at least a year now and it turned out to be a lot more than what I expected.
First of all, it’s Guitar Center so they have their regular setups of guitars, basses, proaudio, and drums. However, this is the first Guitar Center to have a Studio aka “GC Studios”. “This is a state-of-the-art destination that offers music education, professional rehearsal studios and certified Pro Tools and Logic training. Here we will offer our customers the chance to learn guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, vocals and develop their recording skills in Pro Tools and Logic.”
I was reading about the studios a while ago but didn’t expect what I saw. These are fully equipped rooms where you can book at a really great rate and at the end of your session you’ll get a full recording of what you played while in session.
Believe me, you’ll find me booking these rooms daily.
I can’t rate the store just yet. When I left at 9PM there was still a line around the building to get in and some of the staff came from other stores in the Bay Area. For now, I can say:
- There’s great parking.
- The store is clean.
- They have stations where you can test pedals in a sound proof room.
- GC Studios!!!!
5925 Shellmound St.
Emeryville, CA94608
Phone: (510) 559-1055
Resources:
http://www.guitarcenter.com
http://www.gcstudios.com
http://edelalon.com/blog/2010/10/bay-area-guitar-center-review
I called the main store to try to book some time at the studio side. Turns out they couldn’t transfer me.
Here’s the information for the studio side.
5925 Shellmound St.
Emeryville, CA 94608
510-597-0285
Hours of Operation:
M-F: 10am – Midnight
Sat: 10am – Midnight
Sun: 11am- 10pm