Author Archives: johnray

Manuel Bellido 1974 and Antonio Marin 1966

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The Ferrer family in Granada was an extremely important force in making Granada what it is today but the more I learn about that time the more I see that even with Eduardo Ferrer’s influence Granada might have gone in a very different direction.  What really changed everything was the influence of two young friends, both cabinet makers, one who began working for Eduardo Ferrer and the other who was a family friend of the Ferrers.  Antonio Marin Montero and Manuel López Bellido set up shop together and started on the road to forming the two most important guitar making dynasties in Granada.  Depending on whom you speak to the story is slightly different but without a doubt there was teaching and learning on both sides.  Antonio was the more experienced cabinet maker while Manuel had more experience making guitars.   But what made this venture so much more important than Casa Ferrer?  It might have everything to do with the difference between being a guitar seller who makes guitars (Ferrer) and a dedicated maker (Marin or Bellido) but that reflects my own opinions on this subject which you might not share.  A large number of the guitar makers at the time were trained or later worked in this large workshop.  Some started here and then went to work for Ferrer and others started with Ferrer and then came to the Bellido Montero shop.

I was lucky enough to get two guitars in my shop last week which brought home the quality and passion of the work that these two men did, a Bellido from 1974 and a Marin from 1966.  Both guitars were braced with a light fan, one of them almost exactly Torres, including the unscalloped transverse bars and no bridge strap.  The other had Torres closing braces.  The top thicknesses were in the 1.9-2.0 mm range, the bodies were small and the total string length was 655 in both cases.  Here is a photo of Evaristo Valentí playing the Marin.  I won’t offer any more details about these guitars because the author of the upcoming book about the Granada makers wants to use them to illustrate the evolution of the Granada school.

Rosewood Torres-Evaristo Valentí

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I have a good excuse for writing such a short post this week.  Just a reminder:  Everything with a sharp edge can be dangerous if your attention strays.  The cut isn’t so bad actually but  enough thickness of skin came off that it will be awhile healing.  Meanwhile  here is a shot of the bird’s-eye which came as promised from Rumania and some music played on a Rosewood Torres copy.  The guitarist and soundman is Evaristo Valentí.

Lobet’s Torres

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One of the most talked-about Torres guitars is the guitar which Llobet owned and played for a part of his career.  This guitar has been recorded and copied, examined and published and, quite recently, played in concert.  It was difficult to examine because of the tornavoz but we did get some very good information.  This badly shot video shows some of the tools we used to take measurements of the different guitars at the Barcelona museum.

(I need to learn to choose between handheld shots or tripod shots but never drag the tripod around the way I did here)  Most of the wooden tools were made by my neighbour Thomas Holt (also a guitar maker).

One of the pictures show a method for reading the original dome of the top.  The straightedge is placed on the edge of the guitar in an attempt to follow the angle which the lining was planed at, or the peones (individual blocks) in other cases,were glued at.  A measurement is taken at the other side and that straightedge will be tangent to the curve that the guitar was originally made with.  The information in that angle with respect to the theoretical plane of the top is enough to give us the curve. This is something that Rolf Eichinger used to do when examining historical instruments.  Here is Javier Riba´s first contact with this instrument.  Soundclip

First Arias

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I finally finished the Vicente Arias copy!  Since I wasn’t making this guitar for anyone in particular it kept getting pushed back by the guitars people had ordered.  Here you have a video and some photos of it “in the white”  The sound changes once it is varnished but it is a very slight and predictable change and the builders among you will hear the lack of varnish.  Javier Riba, who will be opening the Cordoba Guitar Festival this year, came by and played a little Sor for us, study no. 12 op. 6.  If you remember, he owns the original and let me do an extensive examination of it.  When you make a copy you are usually trying for both an aesthetic and an acoustic match but the aesthetics are usually easier than the acoustics.  In this case I was very pleased to hear Javier say that the feel of the guitar is very similar to the original and the sweetness of the tone is there too.  The video was made with an audio recorder which also does video but it seems that for a really good audio take it needs to be quite close.  Thanks to Toni Valls and Carlos Juan Busquiel for the advice on finding a recorder and on making the recording itself.