A colleague called me up this week to tell me that someone is using his good name to sell cheap guitars. A player sent him a message with a photo of a guitar with a label he didn’t recognize but with his name and a different address (same city though). He also noticed that the guitar had not been made by himself. This is not a new problem; I have seen factory produced guitars with a label claiming it was built by an individual maker in Granada (a non-existent person) and I have heard of falsifications too of well-known builders. Using Granada on a false label seems to be a marketing technique. This is a real problem for the guitar-maker, firstly because having an inferior product out there can seriously damage your reputation and who knows how many of these instruments there might be. A factory could conceivably produce more instruments in a short time than there are originals. Secondly, if the maker warns potential clients on a web page or social media that bad copies of his instruments are being offered it might actually scare some of them away as they might not trust that they will get the real thing. 

Obviously this type of fraud is reprehensible and should be persecuted but I do wonder how easy it is to trick clients this way with all of the resources at the buyer’s disposal. These days it is rather easy to contact the maker of an instrument by phone, email or a social media account and confirm that the guitar in question was indeed made by him or her. Many of the buyers of my guitars contact me before or after acquiring a guitar from another source. And I have had a few enquiries about the authenticity of these instruments. So far I have not heard of any copies of my work. Not famous enough I guess.

I had another restoration in last month. This was a guitar which had already had some work done on it perhaps on two different occasions. Someone had modified the guitar to conform to what were then modern standards. Neither myself nor the owner thought that undoing all of the changes was a good idea. I fixed a crack or two, installed geared tuning pegs and did some work on the bridge, nut and frets to make it playable.

Josef Pagés was the son of Juan Pagés who was also a guitar-maker. Very influential in the late 18th and early 19th centuries not only in their native Cádiz but all over Spain. Another of the four guitar-making sons, Francisco, who emigrated to Cuba and worked there expanded the fame of the Pagés family.