When I was fifteen years old my heroes were Carl Sagan and David Suzuki.  For those of you who are not canadian David Suzuki is the life sciences version of Carl Sagan, a geneticist who found that he had a talent for explaining science to the layman.  I suppose somewhere in my motivations for this blog is that fascination and respect for these two men. Perhaps I can bring the world of historic guitars and guitar-making to people who know little about it and to that end having access to different formats is useful. I enjoy the complete freedom that self-publishing affords but to have someone else value my work enough to publish it (especially in this age of paper phobia) is exciting and offers a challenge in that they demand a certain level of rigour and novelty. I also greatly appreciate those that invite me to speak about my investigations.

The original idea of this blog was to publish articles that would interest the guitarist and the collector of guitars and thereby get them interested in my instruments. I very quickly found that the only thing of interest I could write about was old guitars and my own workshop. I have a few guitarist followers but my main public is guitar-makers or people on their way to learning the craft. So my blog isn’t garnering the desired audience but I have got quite attached to it so I think I will carry on. I do get a lot of positive feedback as well so there is that. I usually mention here anything that I have published so none of this will be new to the faithful reader. However, I would like to list everything I have published and presented in one place.

Publications

The Art of Guitar – María Isabel López Gonzalvez. Photographs of my work. My only contribution was translation of the texts. 2006

Roseta – Spanish musicology journal of the Sociedad Española de la Guitarra

• Guitarra Vicente Arias de 1900 (2010) co-authored with Javier Riba
• Una guitarra para Segovia (2016) co-authored with Elena Gonzalez
• Guitarra de Ignacio Fleta e hijos (2018) co-authored with Leopoldo Neri

A review of basic procedures for an organological examination of plucked-string instruments, Journal of Cultural Heritage Special Issue Wooden Musical Instruments (2017), Elsevier. co-authored with Aarón García, Antonio Manjón and Thomas Holt

Experimental assessment of the effect of an eventual non-invasive intervention on a Torres guitar through vibration testing, Journal of Cultural Heritage Special Issue Wooden Musical Instruments (2017), Elsevier. co-authored with Marco Antonio Pérez, Antonio Manjón and Roger Serra-López.

Adopting a policy of Faithful Copies of Historically Important Musical Instruments as an Alternative to Restoration in Wooden Musical Instruments: Different Forms of Knowledge (2018), Philharmonie de Paris. co-authored with Aarón García, and Antonio Manjón

Las Guitarras de Llobet in Miguel Llobet: Del Romanticismo a la Modernidad (2016) Gran Teatro de Córdoba. co-authored with Antonio Manjón

The Granada School of Guitar-makers (2014) Diputación Provincial de Granada I co-ordinated this collection of writings and I am credited as editor.

Talks