I’m from Canada I studied uh University degree there and about halfway through I started uh taking guitar lessons uh immediately fell in love with the guitar the the beauty of the sound the the the ease with which you can get started the the universality of the instrument it’s everywhere every country in the world has something some variant on the guitar uh but I wasn’t much of a player and if you start at 20 years old 21 years old there’s not much of a future for you as a player anyway so so I started looking for ways to to stay close to the guitar it was it was I decided that the guitar was my life and and how could I do that if I didn’t play so of course I discovered quickly that that there are people who make guitars from start to finish and that those are the best guitars in the world so I thought that’s what I’ll do I’ll become a guitar maker so I finished my degree saved up some money this was in Edmonton when I was planning my trip to Spain and uh I thought I’d come for a year to Granada which everyone knows is a great Center of guitar making and I’d go back to Canada and become a a great guitar maker and uh I’m still here 35 years later
the guitar made in Granada at least in in the’80s when I got here was was quite well defined it was it was a continuation of Torres when everyone else had stopped doing that because of course the Madrid School the beginning middle of the century last century was a continuation of Torres through Manuel Ramirez but there’s really no one who carried on that work into the 80s in Madrid and and of course then there’s this you know they started selling a lot of factory-made guitars and the reputation of Madrid went downhill but in Granada again through the continuation of Torres the people who taught Torres here in Granada that tradition continues alive until today so a light responsive small bodied guitar seems to give a lot of players what they want and I thought they were great and so I wanted to make them
that was a long road um my first step was to go to all the workshops and hassle all the all the guitar makers and and some of them were more friendly some of them were helpful uh really no one said I have time I have space come and work with me which is what I had hoped for so that didn’t happen but uh I did start making an instrument and Jonathan Hives an English maker who who was active at the time uh saw my work and advised me on it in the beginning uh then I met Chacón who’s from Malaga he did a workshop here in Granada and he invited me to go down on the weekends where he had an informal School where he taught people instrument making then a few years later I met Rolf ier who was working here and uh he did very much take me under his wing helped me rent this space helped me outfit it uh gave me work to do on his guitars and advised me on on how to make better guitars
myself
uh Rolf was an extremely serious uh man German and maybe maybe stereotypical German maybe there’s no one else like him in Germany but he was very serious very committed um and everything he did had a purpose so he left nothing to chance and and I think think that that shaped me in a big way um he was very demanding as well with himself and with me and and you can if you talk to other people in Granada who had contact with him I’ve had people say to me I don’t know how you managed to stay with him so long um but obviously he was he had great uh great qualities and and he taught me an awful lot specifically about his guitars um what I try to copy because I do make my own my own I do my own thing I make my own instrument but I want to copy the three-dimensionality of his sound um I want to get the kind of Separation you play a chord on a guitar and you want to hear each note at the same time that you hear the whole and uh not all guitars have that not all guitars have beautiful polyany um and his always did and I think mine do
too can I go get it
yeah this uh is my concert model as you can see it’s not finished yet I’m working on one of these at the same time as I work on a few other instruments so this guitar when it’s finished will be the best guitar the this will be what I have in my head when I’m trying to make a guitar if someone says make me a great guitar I’ll use this model because I have developed it to be what I want it to be um this this model started out from 19 37 no 1943 Hauser uh just a plan a a blueprint and if you look inside and even if you trace the shape today there are almost no similarities left I’ve I’ve changed things little by little I now use the body shape that Rolf used um and the depth that he used I used five fan struts and a thin bar underneath the fan struts to support the bridge there’s a there’s a nice curve on the top not a not a very pronounced curve but sort of typical in the way that the Granada makers work I make a 64 scale and a 65 scale in this in this model uh there was no reason really that I started with house except except that I had access to a blueprint um chakon in Malaga uh said you if you want to make a guitar use this blueprint he he was not a guitar maker he did make guitars throughout his career but uh he was a violin maker so this is what he had to offer
mhm I I’ve been very lucky I’ve been able to examine in great detail many Torres guitars Santos guitars Barbero um and and Simplicio many other makers but but those those early Spanish makers and uh there’s something very seductive and uh a very high quality in those guitars and it may be that we’re making better guitars today but we’ve left something behind as well we’ve left something behind as well and I’m going back and trying to capture that so so yes those those makers have certainly influenced me uh modern makers I could I could mention almost anyone in Granada um uh the guitars of of Bernd Martin um Rolf Eichinger of course Antonio Marin Montero
uh Jose Lopez Vellido all of those makers have have taught me something through the examination of their guitars uh I I have great respect for people like Daniel Friederich uh but but yeah maybe I’ve mentioned everyone who’s who’s actually had an effect on me Torres is is easy um he brought so much to the guitar he he Consolidated all these um advances in the guitar he was able to see what other people were doing put it all together and make a better guitar and and of course make a make a larger guitar would seem to respond better to to what we what the guitarists were looking for at the time uh Santos uh came from Santos is very interesting uh as far as I can tell Santos first uh guitar making job was with a guitar maker from Granada um uh Rafael Ortega and on his labels he said El granadino this this Ortega and and in in a newspaper article Santos actually says that he worked with that guitar maker before he worked with ram and of course Santos also I think through Ram it made violins so Santos was able to put the guitar together in at least three different ways he he didn’t necessarily use the way we use which is face down and gluing the the glue blocks onto the sides and the top at the same time he did it many other ways um he he achieved a quality that I think no one including Torres had achieved up until the I I he’s my hero he I think he’s the best guitar maker that has ever been inside or outside of Spain um now Barbero perhaps did something similar for the flamco guitar um uh we’re in both cases we’re talking about very light very easy to play guitars um very responsive especially very responsive even if you find one that’s not so light it still has this this explosiveness and this uh ease of of
response my first copy and I made 10 or 20 of those was Antonio Thea from Malaga a romantic guitar now I had access through my teacher at the time I had access to the collection of an canti and that guitar was copied from the original those I made those copying the original Antonio the guar um and and that was done because my teacher didn’t have as much respect for the modern guitar as he had for the the uh early guitar but once I started doing it I I found the interest of oh these people worked in a slightly different way there’s a different sonority here and so I got very interested um I then moved on to a Torres copy and I was able to examine the guitar the SE 153 which belongs to Trepat and he was very generous in allowing me access to the instrument um from the first time I heard a Doris guitar I was I was seduced by the the sound and that may a lot to do with who’s playing but but there was something there which attracted me so I made my first copy it was successful extremely successful in in the sense that it’s still being played today and it’s been recorded and uh concerts have been played on it um and I learned so much from this this man who who’s no longer with us uh and of course now whenever I come across a guitar from 150 years ago like the Santos that I saw in Madrid in the in the musical Library like the simplio that A friend brought to me about a year ago um like the Adas that uh plays on I the first thing that crosses my mind is what does it sound like and can I make a guitar that sounds like that um and and I don’t always like the sound of these old early guitars but but in general I I appreciate something about them now what I’m trying to do when I make a copy or at least originally my first copies of course I wanted that sound I wanted an exact copy I wanted to do everything the way the original maker had done it and get the same result
um it’s now been 30 years no 1990 well uh yeah 30 years since I made since I started my first copy and I’ve come to see that
using working with
wood and finishing a guitar you never have the same result as a guitar that’s been played or sitting there for 150 years it’s impossible the wood has deteriorated the wood has crystallized more it doesn’t matter how old the wood I wood is that I use it it goes through a process once it’s made into a guitar and you can’t substitute that the passage of time so that’s one thing um it’s really hard to know what the quality of the wood were that they used to make their guitars so I use the best wood I can find I I I manipulate it to try and find out its physical properties which are the important properties of the wood but I can’t do that to the wood they used so I can look at it I can tap on it but I can’t tell what the wood was like so there’s so many uh unknowns when I make a copy but I still strive to make it sound like the original I still strive to do everything the same on the inside and the outside um and and of course the fact that they I’m selling them is a huge motivator I am a an artisan crafts person I am trying to make a living so so what the market demands is extremely important and if I can find a place in the market for what I love that’s
beautiful the the the main difference between a factory made guitar and a guitar made by one person is the control over every process and what that gives you is that um I’m making this wood work with this wood I’m making the two come to together to be the best they can be I’m I’m uh flexing a piece of wood to know what I need to do with it to get the sound I want before I before I put it all together um I’m working with a material which is extremely variable I don’t care if you cut 10 tops from the same tree they are going to vary in their response and their quality and so I I will choose five of those tops and I will use them but I need to treat each one slightly differently so it depends on who who’s making the guitar they may uh sinin the top differently they may brace the top differently they may sand the top differently at the end um there there’s any number of things you can do but when you make a guitar in a fact Factory first of all the factory guitars cannot come back for warranty work they do but the the the owner of the factory doesn’t want those guitars coming back that loses money so make sure the top is thick
enough nice thick nice thickness so that they won’t have any problems so that’s kind of a priority over sound whereas my priority is sound I have made at least one instrument that the top has failed on as soon as I put the strings on I could see the top was failing so now and that’s that’s a that’s a gift because now I know how close I can work to that line I want to work right up to that line to where the top is going to fail but I don’t want it to fail ever now after 50 years maybe it will but 50 years is is a good run for guitar so uh I control every process I I I look at the guitar at the end I look at the guitar at each stage and I can say oh moving in the wrong direction here go back do it again um oh I need to work on that a little bit more um Factory guitars there there’s there’s nobody to to do that at each stage and if there is someone to do that they’re not the same person there’s not communication you know between them so um so that’s a little long- winded but um that’s that’s the difference um now having said that imagine that you get a soft piece of wood or a wonky kind of a set to make your factory guitar on and it’s so soft that overbuilding it using this really thick top is just what that top needed so there may be and I say this for your for your uh Watchers there may be a factory made guitar out there one among 10,000 which is perfect which sounds as good as many handmade guitars but it’s chance that made that guitar whereas the handmade guitar the the one person the luor made guitar is they call it um he he’s striving for that on every instrument whether he makes it or not he’s striving for
that sometime about 2011 maybe someone had a great idea I think it was it was uh Jose Lopez Vellido and uh Juan Miguel Jimenez who’s a guitar player here they decided that the guitar makers should get together and do a kind of a festival series of of uh talks and concerts and uh of course an exhibition of our work and I got very excited about that I thought that was a great idea um because I think Granada is is the greatest Center of guitar making in the world I believe that the best guitar makers are here and that in in terms of quality and history it’s it’s uh it’s the place so I went to the meeting about this uh festival and I took along these beautiful guitar books you know I had the the Sheldon ear collection and I had the the uh exhibition the catalog from the exhibition of the uh that they did in Madrid and and New York and some other you know nice the Italian book The Rona and balner book and I showed them to the to the guitar makers I said like you know not many of our guitars are in here you know like we need to get our guitars into books like this this is this is how people get excited about about buying nice guitars and so uh of course they said oh well sure you if we have an exhibition you make the catalog um to make a long story short the exhibition and the festival never happened but I continued to work on this line of making a catalog of guitar makers in grenan and uh somehow uh we got the um local provincial government on board and it took 3 years it took 3 years to to finally publish but uh yeah it was published and that was sold out in in the space of three or four more years the all the copies were sold out and we’re working on another another addition because it just seems to me that people want to know what’s going on in in Granada they want to know the history they want to see the guitars and uh yeah it’s it’s been out of print since 2018 and I get inquiries about it uh probably every
month this is a copy of Francisco
simplicio a client contacted me last year and asked if I could if I could do a copy of simp now I never do what I call a copy which is again as I explained trying to get everything right I never do a copy unless unless I have seen an original instrument which I can which I can copy um I need to understand so much about the maker uh before before I can start that sort of thing so I hadn’t seen in the way I like to see meaning photograph measure examine in great detail I hadn’t seen a simplio up close at that time and and so I said I might be able to get my hands on one I’ll let you know and it was it was just chance um a friend of mine bought a simplio and uh within a month of speaking to this client I had a simplicio here in the workshop and was able to to do everything I needed um I had some great help from a from another maker from franisco who who did a lot of the measuring I this this is not an exact copy because I have here the head carving if you can see that and this was something which the client asked for
specifically and I used instead of using the original rosette design I used a rosette design which is simplicio which I had seen many years ago in Casa Lutier which I think is just genius it has sort of a double double motive running through it um the interior structure is very simplio it’s got eight bars instead of seven or five the uh heel again is this they’ve compared it to a woman’s U uh shoe um the the puring on the back all these things are Simplicio design
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