a spanish guitar maker
As creatives, we continue to explore the many different mediums as to what interests us most, but there’s one medium we all share, love and embrace and that’s music. Music is diverse, constantly evolving and has the ability to reduce anxiety, blood pressure and pain, as well as improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness and memory. Graham’s love of music took him in a slightly different direction to most of us, after decades of playing his flamenco guitar he decided to build a flamenco guitar himself'. So where would you start?
One just doesn’t decide how to build fine instruments without a little research and that came via Graham’s partner Lauren, when she looked into the world of classical and flamenco guitar building via the web for direction and soon came up with a result. Now, the pair of them had already planned to go travelling in Europe for a while in a converted van and Spain was an option for them. This tied in rather nicely with the fact that a well known Spanish guitar maker, Stephen Hill was located there, so as part of his trip, Graham enrolled on an intense one months course with the master and that’s how he began his journey, plus the travelling too of course. Little did Graham know then that 4 years later, he’d still be in Spain and become Stephen’s apprentice.
“All the woods I use have different densities and acoustic values”
Graham told me, “I think we may well have stayed out there but something drew us back to Cornwall. I guess we never meant to leave Cornwall and after 4 years I wanted to start my own workshop, so we decided to move back home”.
12 years down the line, Graham is indeed back in Cornwall still building and producing fine examples of his very own classical & flamenco guitars. He now has that workshop he wanted, fully kitted out with all that he needs by his side. Graham has a choice of woods that he likes to work with such as Alpine Spruce and Western red Cedar for the soundboards, that’s the front of the guitar to you and me, and Cypress, Rosewood and Ziricote for the back and sides of his guitars. I had no idea of the importance of the right woods to use which Graham tells me plays a crucial role in producing the quality of sound. He told me “All the woods I use have different densities and acoustic values and these all have an effect on the finished instrument combined.”
It’s always a pleasure to watch and document craftsmen such as Graham working and producing beautiful examples of their work by hand, a process that can take several months to complete for his customers based world wide. Thanks Graham, RD
