I looked at a good book at the Barnes and Noble Book Store on Guitars. The book is
published by Barnes and Noble itself. Barnes and Noble is in the Publishing business as
well as the Book Store Business. With their Great Number of Book Stores Barnes and Noble
knows that any book it publishes will find it’s way to the market. Smart Marketing on
the part of Barnes and Noble.
The book on Guitars traced the Guitar’s History from when it evolved from the Lute
in Spain. It has write ups on the Great Guitar Builders. It is a very complete book on
Guitars from the beginning until the present time.
Torres, in Spain, was the first Great Nylon String Guitar Builder. Torres is considered
the Stradivarius of Guitar Makers. Torres kept his design and method of building as secret
as possible. Of course anyone could take his Guitars apart and see how they were designed.
Oddly enough Torres had a hard time making a living building Guitars and married a rich
woman, his second or third wife and she financed him going in the business of selling Fine
China. However after 5 years of operating the china shop Torres begin building Guitars
once more while he still operated the China shop.
I would tend to think that if one could find a Guitar made by Torres himself the
instrument would be astronomical in price. I have never seen such an instrument for sale.
I read that Torres never signed his Guitars but instead only numbered them. This caused
more than one really great Guitar Builder to build Torres copies and sell them as Guitars
Built by Torres himself.
The Torres Guitar Elevated the instrument to where it could compete with the Piano in
Classical Music. I read the Guitar was considered a peasants instrument in Spain before
Torres Started Building Guitars. Of Course it took Andres Segovia to play the Classical
Guitar that came into being long after Torres had passed to the next world. It is said
that Andres Segovia’s rich parents did not want him to play the Guitar since it was
not a respected Classical Music Instrument. After Segovia started giving concerts with the
Guitar the instrument was then accepted as a truly great instrument for Classical Music.
If Torres had not designed and built a larger and louder Guitar that sounded so great
Andres Segovia might never have had a Guitar that could be used for Classical Music
Concerts. Some people said the Torres Guitar was so different to the Guitars of the past
that some people considered the Torres Guitar to be a new instrument.
In the book it tells what Torres said about his Guitar Building at the end, when he
knew it was close to his time to leave the earth. He said the secret of how he built Great
Guitars would go to the Grave with him for there was no way one could put into words how
it was done. Torres said the intelligence is in my finger tips when I feel a piece of wood
to know if the wood is good and that I have worked the wood to the point of it creating a
great sounding Guitar.
Before I read the Guitar Book I had already come the conclusion that Torres expressed
in his last years about how a builder builds a great Guitar. How the Guitar sounds will
depend most on the Builder himself, the intelligence that he gathers over the years and
this intelligence cannot in reality be given to anyone. It is much too complex for one
person to pass it to another person.
The Builder’s innate ability plus all the knowledge he/she has gained over many
years is then used by the inner mind to build the really great Guitars. I suppose the best
way one could learn the technique is by being an Apprentice. But for one to become a great
builder even if they are an apprentice to a great builder, the person must have been
genetically programmed at birth to have the talent that could be developed. This is so
because building a great Guitar requires a certain talent that so very few people are born
with.
Being a Great Guitar Builder in some ways has a parallel to being a great Guitar
player. One must be genetically programmed at birth to have certain artistic talents that
can be developed if they are to be a great Guitar Player. And of course building a Great
Guitar is as much an art as being a great Guitar Player.
Building a great Guitar is carpentry work, but it’s the carpentry work of someone
who has a great artistic talent that enables them to learn to be a great Guitar Builder.
There are many really fine carpenters building Hand Made Guitars, but there are very few
Builders who have the Artistic Ability to build a Guitar that really sounds great. I have
to say that there are as few Great Guitar Builders as there are Great Guitarist, and
I’m talking really great Guitarist not Guitarist that are good, or very good. The
Number of really great Hand Crafters of Guitars alive today you could count on your ten
fingers and have fingers left over. This is also true of the really Great Guitar Players
alive today.
There are of course a great number of Good Guitar Players and Guitar Builders alive
today. But there are very few Great Guitar Players and Guitar Builders. Nature simply
produces very few really Great Guitar Players and Great Guitar Builders.
The very few Great Guitar Builders can produce so few Guitars building them by hand
that they are usually backed up at least 3 years in their orders and some Great Guitar
Builders are backed up 10 years with orders. Of course their Guitars most often sell for
$10,000.00 Plus, and some of the Great Guitar Builders get as much as $25,000.00 plus for
their instruments. This is true for both Classical Guitars and Steel String Guitars, and
it’s true for Mandolins.
I communicated at length a time period of about 4 years, with a Hand Crafter of Guitars
and Mandolins. This man did as so many hand crafters of Guitars do he paid his dues as a
Guitar Repairman then started building Guitars. Though he never put it in these terms he
essentially told me he is a very good builder, but he knows there are builders alive today
that are much better than himself. He knows the Great Builders alive today and has
revealed some of them to me. I have to believe the Guitars and Mandolins by this
particular builder are quite good and worth the money. He sells his Mandolins for around
$3000.00 and this is the price of his Hand Made Classical Guitars. The Arched Top Guitars
by this Builder are priced from around $3500.00 to about $7000.00. This particular Builder
loves doing the Carved Top instruments most. His Arched Top Guitars and Mandolins have the
Carved Tops.
I believe a good Hand Built Instrument can be purchased starting from $3000.00. If you
want a truly great hand crafted instrument generally you will have to pay $10,000.00 plus
and the plus could go to $35,000.00 if you want some fancy inlay work. Inlay work is very
expensive in hand built Guitars.
There are a few web sites, if you can find them, that market many different brands of
hand made Guitars. The really great Builders do not need anyone to market their Guitars
for their Guitars sell themselves and the builder is backed up with orders. The Hand
Crafted Guitars on the web sites that specialize in selling Hand Crafted Guitars are built
by Builders who most likely build a good, and maybe very good, instrument, but they do not
build a Really Great Instrument that sells itself.
The builders themselves are the most important part of any equation in really fine Hand
Crafted instruments. One builder of Hand Crafted Instruments told me the Builder was not
the most important part of the Equation that the design was the most important part of the
equation. If that were true then all any builder would have to do is copy a great design
and they would build a really great instrument. However this is not the case. For the
great designs are in fact copied by hundreds of builders who do not build Great Guitars,
they build only Guitars that are pretty good, but not great by any means. I’m sure
the Builder who told me the design was the most important part of the equation in building
a great Guitar does not build Great Guitars and he may not even know what a really great
Guitar Sounds like, and in fact I’d say this is true.
There is material given in the Barnes and Noble Book on Guitars where a builder tells
of being an apprentice to one of the Great Arched Top Guitar Builders. The Great Builder
passes on to the next world and so the Apprentice starts building copies of his
Master’s Guitars. He says when the first final Guitar is completed it does not sound
like the Master Builders Guitar. He then states that he realizes the sound of a Guitar is
the Finger Print of the builder himself and that he can never build a Guitar that sounds
exactly like the Guitars built by his Master. So he then works on developing his own
sound, his own fingerprint.
The Barnes and Noble Book on Guitars has a section on the English Guitar Builders. This
section tells that a Builder in England Built a Classical Guitar using the Original Houser
Design and they tuned the Sound Board to a certain frequency and the back was tuned to a
certain frequency, just the way Houser himself had done with the Guitar. Then the English
Guitar Builder had Julian Bream to play the Guitar. Julian Bream said it came very close
to sounding as good as the original Tuned Houser Guitar built by Houser Himself. Notice,
Julian Bream said, "Very Close." He did not say the Guitar sounded as good as
the original Houser. The reason that is so is that Houser built the original Houser. There
was a kind of Artistic magic in the building of the Guitar, an Artistic Magic that Only
Houser Himself Possessed.
The builders have a kind of artistic magic that goes into building a musical
instrument. Of course the magic is their talent that has been developed. When instruments
are built on a mass production basis they may sound OK, if the best woods are use and a
good design is used. But they can never sound as good as the Guitars that are built by one
builder, by hand, for the Magic of the Developed Artistic Talent of the Builder goes into
building the Hand Crafted Guitars and that is what gives them their great sound.
There can be a huge difference in sound when you compare the Guitars that are built
using mass construction methods. There is of course great talent involved in setting up
the mass building system, and there is a great difference in the woods used in Guitars
that are constructed on a mass Scale. There is most often a huge variation in the sound
and playability of the Guitars that are built using mass construction methods. Of course
there is a difference in the sound of the Guitar built by even the very best Guitar
Builders, but that variation is much smaller than the variation in the Mass Constructed
Guitars.
If one wants only a beautiful hand built Guitar that sounds good, they can easily find
such an instrument for there are many hand crafters of Guitars in the world today, more
hand crafters than existed in the past. Today’s Affluent Economic World has produced
many people who can afford the price of a hand made Guitar and so many people have became
Hand Crafters of Guitars. If someone wants the finest Hand Crafted Guitar, or Mandolin,
they will have to get on a waiting lists that is quite long and the price of the
instrument will be from $10,000.00 to as much as $25,000.00.
Will the Hand Crafted Guitars built today become high priced collectable instruments in
the future? Only a few of the Hand Crafted Guitars built today will become valuable
collectors instruments. Only the very best Hand Crafted Instruments built in today’s
world have a chance at becoming a super high priced collectable musical instrument. The
Hundreds or perhaps thousands of hand made Guitars that are just good, or very good, but
not Great, will not become Collectable Guitars.
The book at Barnes and Noble Book Stores is very good. It keeps the information to a
minimum depth for that is all that most people want to read. Barnes and Noble knows the
reading world and gears the books they publish towards the mass market.
