If it ain't broke, don't fix it. So the saying goes, unless, of course, you don't know it's broken.

Such was the case when the bassist for Patty Hurst Shifter brought his instrument to Austin luthier Jeff Rice for a setup — a recommended 18-month tune-up of sorts. It was the season of the South by Southwest Music Festival and Rice, a former bassist in Ryan Adams' Whiskeytown, realized that the North Carolinian had come too far to play a showcase without his A game.

So he gave his fellow bassist a quick lesson in getting good "action."

"The action is the distance from the top of the frets to the strings, and most people want low action because it's easier to play," Rice says.

Rice is among a legion of instrument builders and repairmen — luthiers, tube-amp specialists, tuners, etc. — killing time between their own solos making sure other musicians are ready to rock. SXSW acts looking to yank the ears of the industry, critics and fans would be wise to take advantage of their expertise.

"Lots of people grow up playing cheap guitars, where the action is real high and it's hard to play," he says, "but they don't know any different, and they just haven't learned because they're too busy concentrating on writing songs."

Save for the random cobwebs of white running through his wavy hair, Rice is a boyish 37-year-old father of 18-month-old twins, and a proud member of Austin Stay-At-Home Dads. After apprenticing in the art of stringed-instrument craftsmanship and repair for six months — no pay! — he opened his own shop, Intown Guitar Repair, in the garage of his Barton Heights home.

Here, in the cradle of warm, old-time guitar numbers emanating from a hidden radio, surrounded by pegboards filled with enough tools to impress Bob Vila, Rice reveals that he got his big break when he worked magic for Austin's roots rock legend Jon Dee Graham.

"He's Jon Dee," Rice says, the thrill and reverence of a fan apparent. "And Jon Dee knows everyone."

Word of mouth spread to other Austin music royalty, among them "Scrappy" Jud Newcomb, Ian McLagan and Gurf Morlix. Add to that free advertising courtesy of his brother Brad, who plays with Tift Merritt, Elvis Costello and Son Volt, and Rice is quickly becoming the local go-to guy for services, switching factory-made bone nuts and saddles with material that produces better tone, such as cow bone; replacing pickups, output jacks and switches; and intonation, a process in which a strobe tuner is employed to coordinate the octaves of the top fret with the open string.

Although Rice is adamant about the distinction between his role as a highly skilled luthier and that of a guitar tech, he's still willing to go above and beyond the call of duty for a guitarist in a pickle. Check it: During a Shifter show at a later date, the guitarist broke a string and didn't have the manpower to fix it, so Rice attended to the loose end right there on the spot. Talk about customer service.

Elizabeth Hernandez/American-Statesman Can't plug in your sound? Call Jon Bessent, the amp doctor at Tonecraft Amp Repair. He used to build power supplies for NASA; now he can relaunch your amplifier in a single day.

Pushing the sound to 11

Give tube-amp-repair savant Jon Bessent enough time and he could build a rocket to Russia. Four years ago today, Jon and his wife, Merlyn, carved out a corner as a luthier at Walter Hutcherson's Musical Exchange, an instrument co-op in North Austin that houses four different operations, and opened Tonecraft Amp Repair.

Bessent's obsession with electronics began at an early age, when he plugged a bobby pin into an electrical outlet in his West Texas hometown of Pecos, thus beginning a life rife with shock treatment.

Throwback-meets-outlaw in his black T-shirt, jeans, black cowboy boots, unruly goatee and braids in the style of the other "W," Bessent values looking a customer dead in the eye and imparting the truth. (Don't get him started on machine-made vs. handmade equipment.)

After 10 years of working at Texas Instruments as an engineering technician building power supplies for NASA, Bessent followed his heart and pursued his love: tinkering with amplifiers of all kinds, especially Fender, and painstakingly recreating or accumulating all of their requisite accessories.

Bessent says that tube amps are finicky devices, and all of the traveling can take its toll on them. But at the end of the day there's no surefire way of anticipating a meltdown. "The chances of an amp failing when you don't need it are pretty small," he says, twiddling the knob on his oscilloscope, one of the many instruments cluttering his work table, dubbed the Scrutinizer. "It's usually gonna fail onstage, or in the studio at $150 an hour." Drumroll, please. "I think Murphy had something to say about that."

Not only is Bessent one of the few people who can turn an amp around the same day, he also makes high-end guitar effects used by the likes of Billy Gibbons and Tom Petty. The handcrafted pedals are made at Austone Electronics, and they represent "a kind of last bastion of hardcore, handmade-in-America stuff."

The same principle applies to the inventive fix Bessent conceived for a Japanese band who brought in a stripped out, hard-to-replace, Floyd Rose whammy bar during last year's SXSW. Overstepping his domain of expertise, Bessent shined by cutting a piece of a soda straw and inserting it into the hole in the guitar to act as a grip.

"They were amazed," Bessent says. "They kept saying 'Ah, so deska,' which is Japanese for 'Oh, now I understand.' I said, 'Here, spare parts,' and gave them the rest of the straw."

This DIY ethic and honest approach sums up Tonecraft's philosophy. "Our whole thing is getting people back up and playing," Merlyn says, before introducing me to Walter Hutcherson. "That's our contribution to the world."

Father tone

Elizabeth Hernandez/American-Statesman Walter Hutcherson of Musical Exchange began fine-tuning his skills in the 1960s by picking the brains of the technicians who spoke at music-store product seminars.

Whereas Bessant looks the part of the eccentric uncle, Hutcherson comes off as the no-nonsense father. He's been in the fretted-instrument business longer than all but one or two people in town, and gleaned his knowledge from the technicians speaking at music-store product seminars in the '60s.

An autodidact by nature and trade, Hutcherson would pick their brains, collect phone numbers and find out where to get parts. This was when the sophisticated repair tools of today were mere prototypes. "I could have invented many things had I patented them," he says.

For Hutcherson, whose son is married to the daughter of one of the store's other proprietors, Musical Exchange is an extended family, "a bird's nest on the ground," as he calls it. After all, it's community, and building reputations, and going the extra mile that have helped keep independent stores alive in the era of big-box retailers.

On the contrary, with small numbers comes the downside of a one-to-two week backlog. "I'm probably sitting here with about 40 things waiting for me to get to," Hutcherson says. "But I do the squeaky wheels first."

The other strings

Strings of a different ilk can retire to nearby Violins Etc., for repairs and rentals related to violins, violas, cellos and upright basses. Among the common repairs manager Kyle Clayton cites are sound-post adjustments ("It's kind of like putting a ship in a bottle"), peg adjustments and work on bridges and seams. "Weather, humidity, temperature changes — all really affect these kinds of instruments," he says. "If you're coming from Canada, where it's cold and dry, and you come down here, where it's warm and humid, things are going to happen."

Violins Etc.'s staff includes Mark Rubin, a radical musician most notably of the Bad Livers, and Darcy Deaville, a fiddler for the Meat Purveyors who sometimes gigs with Ray Wylie Hubbard. With the recent addition of a classical player, Violins Etc. is equipped to service a cross-pollination of influences. "It's pretty amazing what we end up with here," employee Raul Guerrero says. "We've had balalaikas, we've had ouds . . . That 'Etc.' is so general."

Boulevard of Broken Instruments

The safest bet for musicians in need of musical ER is Lamar Boulevard. Pretend it's the Boulevard of Broken Instruments. Start at Strait Music Company, at the intersection of Lamar and Ben White boulevards. It's a full-service retailer, carrying keyboards, drums, guitars and lots of trinkets in between. What they can't fix they can refer elsewhere.

Due north a couple of miles is Austin Vintage Guitars, a small place run by Steven Fulton. Client name-droppings: Eric Johnson and Charlie Sexton. "We fixed an amp for Paul Westerberg when he was in town," Fulton says.

Next door is the Custom Shop Guitar and Bass. Luthier and proprietor Rob Hacker spent a summer long ago studying with the master, Hideo Kamimoto. "It was a Zen-grasshopper kind of thing," Hacker says. Both Fulton and Hacker are psyched about the new Alamo Drafthouse next-door, which affords their customers a flick and meal while they wait.

Directly on the other side of Lamar, tucked behind Rising Sun Japanese Auto Repair, is Tommy's Drum Shop, celebrating its 25th year in business. The Resentments' drummer, John Chipman, works there, and recalls the time they lent a Paiste cymbal to Sheila E. when she was in town performing at Alejandro Escovedo's "Por Vida" benefit. "We try to jump through hoops for people."

The list goes on and on. About anywhere you look in South Austin and beyond, a player is making and fixing, or a maker and a fixer is playing. Happy huntin' and, as Jon Bessent says, "May the tone be with you."