Middleboro business keeps guitars, and their stories, alive
Ben Sangiolo at his guitar repair shop “Sovrano Guitar Royalty” in Middleboro. Photos by Anna Milton
Sangiolo hard at work polishing a guitar. 
“When I’m talking about this stuff, everything just melts away:” Ben Sangiolo. 
Part of tuning up a guitar is removing the strings. 
The guitar gets a cleaning. 
Then, he polishes the frets, or the metal strips that indicate where to place your fingers to play a specific note. 
A surprising amount of dirt accumulates from a player’s fingers. 
Sangiolo applies wood cleaner. 
Now, it’s time to put on new strings.
Ben Sangiolo at his guitar repair shop “Sovrano Guitar Royalty” in Middleboro. Photos by Anna Milton
Sangiolo hard at work polishing a guitar.
“When I’m talking about this stuff, everything just melts away:” Ben Sangiolo.
Part of tuning up a guitar is removing the strings.
The guitar gets a cleaning.
Then, he polishes the frets, or the metal strips that indicate where to place your fingers to play a specific note.
A surprising amount of dirt accumulates from a player’s fingers.
Sangiolo applies wood cleaner.
Now, it’s time to put on new strings.
MIDDLEBORO — The only time Ben Sangiolo doesn’t feel anxious is when there is a guitar in front of him.
The way his face glowed as he stared at the red semi-hollow guitar in his Middleboro-based guitar repair shop, indicated the validity of his statement.
As he spoke, jargon flowed seamlessly off his tongue. Semi-hollow guitars have characteristics of both acoustic and electric guitars.
For some people, going to the gym is their escape; for him, it’s working on or playing a guitar, he said.
“When I’m talking about this stuff, everything just melts away,” Sangiolo said.
He opened Sovrano Guitars, a guitar repair shop located on North Main Street in Middleboro, in March of 2023.
Opening the shop meant getting back to a hobby that Sangiolo, who picked up the instrument after playing sessions of the video game Guitar Hero on repeat in the fifth grade, had abandoned for some time.
After finding an instrumental mentor and watching far too many videos about polishing guitars online, Sangiolo decided to take the entrepreneurial step.
Working on guitars has given him a much-needed lesson on patience, he admitted.
“I’m not a patient person,” he said. In the beginning, he approached each guitar repair project with a burning desire to just get the job done, but soon realized that method didn’t work.
“There are so many aspects that are important. I really had to take the time to learn each individual piece,” he said.
Repairing guitars is a “balancing act,” he said, of paying attention to detail while also understanding how each part affects the instrument as a whole.
Seeing a guitar go from looking “dull and gross” to polished, shiny, and tuned-up is “a total transformation,” he said.
He knows that bringing guitars back to life “is what he’s meant to be doing.”
One of Sangiolo’s favorite projects was fixing up a vintage guitar, built in the 70s or 80s he said, that had been built for a customer who hadn’t touched it in years.
Seeing the customer’s smile when he picked up the guitar, “was worth more than he paid me to do the work,” Sangiolo noted.
Sangiolo’s brand “Sovrano Guitar Royalty” intertwines his Italian heritage with his motto to “treat every guitar like royalty.” Sovrano loosely translates to “sovereign” or “ruler” in Italian, he explained.
Sangiolo equates a well-tuned guitar to a well-oiled machine, or a fresh haircut. “It feels better, it sounds better, it plays better,” and in turn, it makes you want to play it, he said.
To him, guitars “are more than just a piece of wood and string,” he said. “Each one has a story. It’s someone’s cousin’s who passed away, or someone’s father’s that meant a lot to them. It’s the first one they played, or the first one they built on their own.”
And anyone who listens to music has probably been touched by a guitar in some way, Sangiolo noted. Therefore, “it’s important to keep them alive.”
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