Classical Guitar News & Updates

I was born in London, England on 28th of August 1951. I left school at 18 and studied graphic design and printmaking at Bath Academy of Art and the Royal College of Art. My interest in guitar began in the early 60's with the explosion of the pop music industry. My first guitar, a cheap, burgundy colored, acoustic f hole cutaway soon had a pickup fitted, got played endlessly and became what I recognize now as the seed of a passion which has endured to this day.In 1978 while running a furniture-making workshop I made my first acoustic guitar based on a Martin...

In the past twenty five years I have made over 300 classic guitars, most of these being smaller bodied Spruce top instruments. Each guitar is individually hand made and uniquely named. I make every part myself with the exception of the Strings, the Machine Heads and the Fretwire. For the first ten or so years of being in business, I combined making with restoring and repairing which gave me the opportunity to examine some of the finest instruments in the world.These included guitars by Vicente Arias, Paulino Bernabe, Domingo Esteso, Arcangel Fernandez...

I was fourteen years old when I became an apprentice in a special woodworking school in Hungary for three years to become a pattern maker. This is an extremely complicated job requiring great precision. We were taught to do everything by hand. We were not allowed to use any power machines, not even a grinder to grind the chisels. After you were done with a job it was sent to a special room for checking.There was no tolerance. Nothing; I mean not even a tenth of a millimeter. They'd send it back and you'd have to fix it and your salary went down...

Like many members of the post-war baby boom, I grew up believing there were no limits to the direction my life might take, and no compelling reason to constrain my path early on. I tried different things. I began college at UC Berkeley as an architecture major, quit school, worked in a biochemistry lab, returned my draft card and joined the Vietnam war resistance movement (narrowly avoiding prison on a technicality after refusing induction into the army), hitch-hiked through Europe (never got to Spain), went to pottery school and spent several years as a...

Daniele Chiesa was born in Bergamo, Italy in 1973; he has studied classical and jazz guitar since the age of 12. In 1994 he enrolled in the International Violin-making school of Cremona, learning traditional violin-making and repairing and building guitars in his own shop; he graduated in 1998. One year after, he moved to Santa Cruz, California, working for guitar maker Kenny Hill, where he was first exposed to traditional Spanish guitar construction. After almost a year, he went back to his hometown in Italy, where he worked with classical guitarist and guitar maker...

Christopher Dean is one of the world's leading contemporary makers of fine individually handcrafted classical guitars. His instruments are distinguished by both their understated visual beauty and lovely tonal qualities. Not surprisingly, his instruments have long been sought after both for recital and recording by numerous leading international concert artists. His acclaimed clients include: Mark Ashford, Gilbert Biberian, Raymond Burley, Hugh Burns, Simon Dinnigan, Mark Eden & Christopher Stell (Eden-Stell Guitar Duo), John Feeley, Nicola Hall...

The smell of rosewood dust is familiar and comforting, it smells like home. I never gave it a second thought growing up that my father made guitars as it was just what he did. As a child I loved being in his workshop either just sitting watching him work or playing by myself on a corner of his bench. Soon I was busying myself with various projects like boxes, yoyos, and piggy banks. I was thirteen in 1992 when I made my first classical guitar. My younger brother Sagen was going to build a guitar and I wanted to as well...

I have always loved the sound of the guitar, ever since I was sixteen and a friend taught me a few chords. My friend advanced until he required a better instrument, and I went with him to visit a handmaker's workshop. I was twenty then, and the sights, sounds, and smells of that workshop are with me still. I was hooked from the beginning. The lure of making the instrument whose sound held so much appeal for me proved irresistible, especially when I discovered that the best guitars were handmade. I started building at twenty-two...

Olivier Fanton d'Andon was born in Cannes, France (famous for its film festival) on June 12, 1953. He comes from a family of musicians (his father, a pianist and organist, was for a long time the titular organist of Grasse Cathedral in France and an Algiers Cathedral). Olivier Fanton d'Andon learned the flute at an early age and later the classical guitar. He pursued medical studies at Nice University, but at the end of his third year, he decided to stop studying medicine in order to make musical instruments. His artistic and exacting temperament enabled him...

What makes a person aspire to become a maker of musical instruments? Is it a deeply held passion that has to be fulfilled? The answer for one of the world's top guitar makers, Paul Fischer, was much more straight- forward. "I didn't have any idea to make musical instruments - it was the music master in the last term at school who said, 'Is there anyone in the class who would like to make musical instruments?' I just put up my hand and said, 'Yes Sir, please sir, me.' It just sounded so exciting, so fascinating to make an instrument..."

Thomas Fredholm has been crafting fine concert guitars for almost twenty-five years. He writes: "It was the best ever made Martin D 45 that started it all off for me. I heard that instrument and I just had to find out how to do make such a guitar! I was driven, maybe even a little possessed. However, when I began making guitars Sweden could not brag of a guitar making tradition to speak of. So I had to teach my self. The first guitars I made were Western style steel string guitars. These first guitars I put (forced) into the hands of ..."

I was born in Berlin in 1967. Unlike many other makers I dont have a strong musical or woodworking background in my family. I have played classical guitar from the age of 9 and after secondary school I reached a fairly high amateur level. At this point I had to make a decision what to do with the coming period of my life. By some coincidence I came into a traineeship at a violinmakers store. Here I got infected with the instrument-makers virus. From this moment I set my mind on becoming a guitar maker and after...

Trained first as an architect, Bernhard Kresse later turned to making and restoring fine classical guitars - soon specializing in period 19th century guitars. In the many years since becoming a luthier, Kresse has acquired an extensive knowledge of 19th century guitar making traditions - both by examining and restoring original instruments in his Cologne workshop which he established in 1985 and by conducting extensive research in museums and private collections throughout Europe. Today an unusually large and impressive group of international artists perform ...

I was born in South Dakota in 1953 and have spent most of my life working wood. My father was a housebuilder and cabinetmaker who put me to work at a young age. I began building nylon-string guitars in 1992, although I have built and repaired other fretted instruments since the mid-1970s. When my daughter began to study flamenco dance ten years ago, I became fascinated by the flamenco guitar, and still am. My first nylon-string guitars were flamencos. Now that I build mostly classical guitars, my background with flamenco guitars has proven valuable...

Master German guitar maker Kolya Panhuyzen was exposed to the classical guitar at an early age. His father played the instrument, and his uncle, Edgar Mönch, was a highly respected luthier whose guitars were played by Julian Bream, Jorge Morel, and John Williams. It was in the Toronto workshop of Edgar Mönch, in 1967 that Panhuyzen built his first guitar. Eventually Panhuyzen established his own workshop in Toronto in 1974 and later set up a second shop in Germany in 1992. All in all Panhuyzen has made more than 400 guitars which are played by...

In the last couple of days sitting in on the listening sessions for classical and flamenco guitar, I realized that my perspective is so different from when I was younger. I am much more accepting. We are all drawn and pushed toward trying to produce excellence, and we strive to find the best way to get the optimal result. My Zen background tells me that of all of the possibilities, the best way is not a possibility. Because we know - and physics supports this - that everything is unique. It is only when we artificially set up parameters that we can judge...

I have been making classical guitars and other stringed instruments professionally for over twenty years. During this time I have had the pleasure of working with many wonderful musicians; Julian Bream, Pat O'Brien, Leif Christensen and his wife Maria Kammerling, James Kline, Jacob Lindburg, Nigel North, David Starobin, Sting, David Tanenbaum, Scott Tennant and John Williams, to name just a few of my clients of whom you will have heard. Such collaborations produce a fascinating exchange of ideas, which inform all the work I produce...

Master guitar maker Andrea Tacchi was born in Florence in 1956 to an ancient Florentine family. At the age of 15 he made his first guitar and continued building guitars for fun until 1976 when he met his Argentinean Maestro Ricardo Brané who lived and worked in the Chianti region building guitars and lutes. In 1977 he left the University where he was studying Mechanical Engineering to be a full time professional guitar maker. He went to Spain in 1981 and met all the famous Spanish guitar makers in their workshops. This was an important turning point for his future...

German Vazquez Rubio was born in 1952, in the small town of Paracho, Michoacan, Mexico. He began his career in lutherie at the age of eleven. German consciously left school to become apprentice to his uncle Manuel Rubio with the intention of starting a lifelong career and also helping his family financially. At his uncle's shop he would learn to work with many different types of woods and materials. He learned that the most precious woods require the utmost level of care and attention, for there is no room for error in craftsmanship. His uncle Manuel slowly educated him...

Alfredo Velazquez was born on October 23, 1970 in Manhattan, New York.Today through his careful selection of materials and meticulous calibration of soundboards, Alfredo Velazquez constructs instruments which many generations of classical guitarists have come to refer to as having the "Velázquez sound." Moreover, by combining his traditional artistic values with certain modern construction approaches, Alfredo Velazquez' guitars embody a unique balance of the refined tonal characteristics of his father's revered guitars with the power...

Sometimes you will be disappointed when you show a guitar to a person and he says it's no good. If you take that critique in the good way and you start to work on that, it will be for your own benefit. This happened to me. A lot of people in New York stood in front of me and said, ``I don't like your guitar.' Many people are just looking for a big sound, but the guitar is not a piano, it's not a harp. It's a personal instrument. It is the sweetest and most sublime instrument, in this world. You can hear the complete symphony orchestra in one guitar...

I believe that an instrumental performance is a dynamic collaboration between composer, instrument makers, players and audience. In this respect a musical instrument is both an artistic expression of its maker and a conduit by which a performer breathes artistic life into a composer's creation. Given this symbiotic relationship, I believe an instrument maker must among other things study old instruments. This study is important not so much to reproduce instruments that have already been perfectly realized by others...

After building classical guitars in Portland, Oregon, for fifteen years among some of the world's best luthiers, my wife and I decided to move to tropical paradise and construct a home and new workshop. We live at the southernmost tip of the United States, near the southernmost point of the Big Island of Hawaii. My concert guitar is based on the Hauser plan with traditional or open bracing. I'm in love with this sound. I have built a large number of African Blackwood instruments as well as other rosewoods, koa, maple, and mahogany. I try to build light, responsive guitars...