There are plenty of places in San Diego to purchase a guitar or take a music lesson, but only one, Riffs Acoustic Music, also mixes in yoga for a full mind-and-body experience. On Saturday, Oct. 17, Riffs will celebrate its third anniversary with a free special event from 6 to 9 p.m., featuring local acoustic musicians, including singer-songwriter Eddie Fishwick and Rusell Ramo, frontman for local soul rockers The Routine, plus appetizers and a raffle. Funds raised by the raffle will go to Live + Breathe, an organization that helps provide free yoga programs to community groups. Riffs is a full-service music store, offering guitars, ukuleles and basses for sale, as well as repairs and lessons. But uniquely, it also offers music yoga classes in an outdoor studio. Built of redwood, the space is surrounded by bamboo and banana trees, an idyllic, relaxing spot, just feet away from the hustle and bustle of daily life. “It started as a music shop,” explained Riffs owner Steve Hart, a yoga enthusiast and guitarist who had run a live-music yoga class in his native Utah. “We have this really beautiful area in the back where we did live concerts, and we wanted to get more use of the space. I loved it and really wanted to incorporate the two on a regular basis, and so I started a live music yoga program here where we would bring in different local musicians and bands and have them perform during the course of the class.” The pairing was an immediate hit. “People really liked it, and we kind of went with it, and over the course of the last three years we went from one class a week to 33 classes a week. We’re a full-blown yoga studio; we have live music at least once every single day and twice on the weekends in the morning.” While Hart is proud of the shop’s success, he’s happiest with the sense of community that has built up around Riffs. “(It’s) the thing I was hoping for but was a little unsure of,” he said. “It has become a really beautiful (group) of people who are passionate about music and yoga, two things that seem to be, from the outside, two different worlds, but once you mesh them together they are actually very similar.” He notes that the mix of yoga and music can be a bonding experience. “Over the course of the last three years,” he explained, “we’ve really built a strong community who is very passionate about both and have a lot of love and respect for both. We’ve found a lot of couples where there perhaps the wife is a yoga teacher and the husband is a musician, or vice versa, or they are both yogis and musicians. And we found that there is a really strong connection between the two, which I’ve personally always known from my own experience. Hart is happy with Riffs’ growth in the area and considers the studios location, just blocks from the ocean, to be a key. “You get the ocean breezes,” Hart remarked. “I absolutely love Bird Rock. You almost have a small-town feel even though it’s in the midst of San Diego. The people are great. I can walk up the street, and almost everywhere I go I know someone there, So it’s a really great community, and coming from a small town myself, it’s nice to have that same sort of feel around here.” For more information, see riffsstudios.com. The number is (858) 456-2477.
