In any major music mecca, you’ll find a past littered with historic venues, hometown heroes, and bragging rights to a litany of genres and subgenres. Nestled along California’s South Coast, Oxnard, is one of the West Coast’s most diverse musical melting pots; where the sounds of classic rock, alt-R&B, Norteña, indie, punk subgenre Nardcore and more converge. While its established and burgeoning scenes continue to flourish and produce artists like Anderson .Paak and Brooke Candy, Oxnard’s instrument and music media manufacturers reveal a deep musical history that extends far beyond the city’s borders.

“I’ve gone out for dinner at a really nice restaurant, and somebody was singing and playing a solo on one of my guitars,” says Matthew Larrivée of Larrivée Guitars. Founded in the 1970s, the brand made its way to Oxnard in 2001. Since then, a handful of the brand’s famous guitars ended up 248 miles above Oxnard, and the rest of the world, thanks to NASA. After sending a Larrivée P-01 on a discovery mission in 2001, astronaut Chris Hadfield famously used another to record a cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” while inside the International Space Station. In 2018, another P-01 made it to the ISS, but they’d made it to the outer limits long before that. “The first one went up without our knowledge back in the 1990s, and so they asked us to build two more. One in the sky, one on the ground,” Larrivée said, adding that each guitar is fitted with a personalized touch from home base. “As we build the guitar, we all sign it on the inside. So, all my employees’ signatures have gone around the earth, like, 10,000 times.”

For DW Drums, an Oxnard mainstay and a go-to for percussionists since 2000, its strongest ties to global artists lies in their creative, custom-designed kits. At the brand’s factory showroom, drum kits from iconic musicians lay on display, with regular tours each Thursday letting visitors see some of them in person. From Foo Fighters drummer Josh Freese jetset-inspired kit inlaid with his own airline tickets from past flights, to the 24 karat and 1500-year-old Romanian River Oak-detailed kit that served as one of the last ones used by the late Neil Peart of Rush, these custom kit designs are all a larger part of the DW Drums’ storied history. 

In late August, it was also home to the annual Guitar Center-sponsored Factory Day. Along with an official drum-off competition featuring judges like frequent Jack White and Pete Rock collaborator Daru Jones and Fausto Cuevas III, who’s toured extensively with everyone from Stevie Wonder to Jennier Lopez, the rest of the day featured live demos, showroom tours, a group drum lesson with drummer Jason Sutter of Smash Mouth and Foreigner, and giveaways. 

“I can’t think of anything better for a major drum company, than to open their doors to the public, give hands-on demonstrations, and have artists interact directly with consumers,” said Glen Sobel, drummer for Alice Cooper and The Hollywood Vampires. “It’s why DW remains on the cutting edge of not just drum innovations, but customer service and public relations.” 

With these far-reaching musical ties in its history, Oxnard is a city that often looks to the past for cultural cues. Thanks to the continued resurgence of physical media, vinyl pressing factories like Fidelity Record Pressing are leading the charge as artists and labels ramp up both original releases and reissues of major albums on vinyl. The last few years have seen the sale of vinyls outpace the sale of CDs for the first time since 1987 in 2022, and the sale of nearly 50 million albums on vinyl in 2023. It’s a revival they welcome with open arms, with its launch in early 2024 making it the first major vinyl plant to open in California in 40 years. “[In the 1990s], all these big record plants closed down, and they were switching over to making CDs, and immediately there was this outcry from people,” explained the brand’s co-founder Edward Hashimoto. His father, co-founder Rick Hashimoto, spent decades working in record pressing factories across Southern California before opening shop in February. “He got to see people keeping it alive. The punk bands, a lot of the metal guys really loved the records. DJ’s, the audiophiles. They all worked together to help keep records alive during the dark times of about 1994 to 2004.”

Today, the factory focuses on exclusive represses like Van Halen’s Van Halen II, Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon, and Run-DMC’s self-titled debut album; often using a method that more closely preserves the quality of the original master recordings. “It’s theoretically a truer sound compared to the original, similar to what the engineers would have heard in studio,” Hashimoto explained, adding that the intricate process for each re-pressing typically only produces a few thousand copies. “It’s about mastering it and making it sound as good as it possibly can while still keeping the connection to the music, you don’t want to lose the soul of the music. Our job is to reproduce that as best as possible.”

Since its days as a coastal getaway for Hollywood’s biggest names in the 1960s, Oxnard’s reputation as a springboard for creativity, and home to a concentration of global music manufacturers, has stuck. And between its thriving scene and a penchant for nostalgia, it still serves as the city’s cultural backbone.