When I was asked to do an article for the Gypsy jazz issue of Guitar Sessions®, a few technical topics were suggested by Mr. Rekas as possible subject matter. I have decided to write instead about my apprenticeship as a guitar maker in Palma de Mallorca, Spain in the late 60's. This was an era before the Internet, 100-page catalogues of sophisticated luthier supplies, large A.S.I.A and GAL conventions, luthiery schools, C&C machines, and the myriad of instructional books and videos now readily available. Towards the end of the article, however, I will comment on my current building activities with the Gypsy guitar.

From this contemporary vantage point, I walked into what seems like a 19th century Spanish guitar shop where the main difference between then and earlier times was the presence of electricity in the shop. Other than that, just about everything was accomplished in a traditional manner.

It all began in 1965 when I began working in a small music shop in Vancouver, British Colombia. The shop's owner, Mr. George Bowden, not only owned this shop but had a small guitar factory in Palma. He would have the guitars built in Palma and shipped over for retail sale. When I first began working for George, I was presented with about 30 guitars from the Spanish shop that needed repair. I had never done anything like that before and really had little or no clue as how to proceed. Most of the work was action related so as a player and with a little help, I soon figured out how to setup the instruments.

It may be of some interest to note that most of the Spanish guitar makers I met could not play the guitar beyond what we would call rank beginner level. No wonder George's imported guitars had action problems! I suspect this is no longer the case, but in the traditional way of passing on a trade by rote from father to son, if the father didn't play, then it's likely that the son didn't play either.

My newfound career at the guitar shop made me realize that I wanted to spend my life as a guitar maker. As George was getting ready to return to Spain, I proposed that I should come to his shop and do all the action work there. That way he could export guitars anywhere in the world, confident that everything would be in perfect order when it left the shop. George responded by saying, "I can't afford to bring you over, but if you can make your own way, you can stay as long as you want." I didn't need to hear that said twice; I started saving money for my journey.

In September of '65, I boarded a train for Montreal, then hopped on a freighter to Casablanca where I boarded a flight to Madrid and then another to Mallorca. My first impressions of Spain were of a luxury three-room suite in a Madrid hotel for $20.00 on that first night, followed by the flight to Mallorca on an antiquated DC-4 with oil-laden exhaust emanating from each engine as it lumbered down the endless runway.

The guitar shop named "Los Guitarreros de Mallorca" was in an area of town with residences and small businesses. The shop had one of those roll-up metal doors and inside there were five rooms with a detached machine shop in back. There were seven employees: two guitarreros [guitar makers] - one of whom was assisted by his son, two young men as general assistants, and two women who did the French polishing.

The two guitar makers, José Ferrer from Granada and Maestro José Orti Benieto from Valencia, were responsible for the production of the various models. Ferrer along with his son Pepe made the better guitars. They produced about 6 per month when father and son weren't at each other's throats.

It is José Orti that I wish to speak about, an artisan with more amazing skills and tricks up his sleeve than I have ever encountered in all my experience in the field. Whereas Ferrer was a master in his own right, working meticulously to create very finely crafted instruments, Maestro Orti would make- from start to finish- 7 guitars in one week! We are not talking about the fine craftsmanship or concert-quality guitars here; what the Maestro made were typical walnut guitars which were produced mainly in the shops of Valencia such as Tatay, or Telesforo Julve. These were your ordinary, everyday guitars costing about $25-$40 in Spain at the time.

Just how does someone set about making 7 guitars in one week? It had to be seen to be believed. First of all, the soundboards, backs and sides were sanded on a large machine called a stroke sander that had a tray that rolled in and out beneath a fast-moving belt. You might use the same machine to sand doors. It was big, overkill really.

For those who use a heated press to bend sides, consider having to burn charcoal in the firebox of the bending iron and using a stovepipe as the bending surface. The Maestro would bend perhaps 21 sets of sides in a morning on such a device. He was at his happiest while doing this work. It was the only time we used to hear him sing as he worked.

Application of the fan struts on the underside of the soundboard was accomplished by putting the glue on each strut in its place according to the pattern and then placing another soundboard on top of that one and gluing the next set of struts. When 7 soundboards with struts glued in place were stacked atop each other, a flat board was placed on top and a 25 lb. rock topped everything off as the press. To the best of my knowledge, no fan strut ever popped loose from any of the 300+ Orti guitars that I set up.

The Maestro would then sweep the floor, clean everything up and head off to the corner bodega for a "copa de vermouth". At this juncture, I should tell you that each operation he performed on a brace of guitars was punctuated by a cleanup and a trip to the bodega.

A guitar built in the Spanish tradition has the neck glued to the soundboard. There are slots in each side of the heel in which the sides are inserted. The ends of these sides are not square but cut at an angle of 15 degrees or so. In order to make this cut, the Maestro had a gigantic pair of scissors about 24 inches long! One handle of the scissors was made so that it could be clamped to the bench. With the other handle firmly in hand, the end of the side was cut off at the appropriate place and angle; I never once saw a side crack from the application of this crude device.

No moulds were used for the body. The bent sides were simply clipped onto the soundboard with small friction clamps made of wood. The guitar was placed upside down on the "solera" or workboard and the tailblock was installed with another slotted jig with wedges. The back was clamped on with rope and wedges.

Now comes the real drama-
It was cold and damp in the shop. The building was made of porous sandstone and in winter or rainy weather you could never really get warm. However, you could always watch the Maestro put on binding. You see, the glue we used was hide glue which needed to be warmed up for application as it needs to be at a certain viscosity to function properly; this viscosity would be ruined by exposure to room temperature if it weren't clamped right away.

So, wood shavings were kicked up into a pile in the middle of the floor (as everything was made of stone) and lit on fire. The Maestro would proceed to wrap on the binding with rope wrestling the guitar over the open fire to keep it warm so the glue wouldn't congeal too fast. I consider myself fortunate to have witnessed this feat.

Shortly after that, we started to use the now common white glue. No more fires from now on, if you don't count the time Ferrer's son Pepe tried to prove to the women in the French polishing room that the highly volatile mixture of shellac and alcohol wouldn't burn if he stuck a lit match in the mixture.

One day, suspecting that the Maestro was having difficulty with his vision, we checked out his glasses. He never wore them to the bodega. The lenses were actually very powerful non- prescription magnifying glasses with a useable focal length of about 7" give or take ½ inch! Through the Maestro's lenses, the frets looked like railroad tracks and the strings looked like ship's ropes! He told us he had bought them in a bar for 50 pesetas some years ago. George took him to the eye doctor to be tested for real glasses. Within three days of getting them, they were relegated to the bottom drawer and he was wearing the old ones again.

And on it went...

The Maestro died in 1968. He had been a third generation guitarrero. He had defended Madrid in the Spanish Civil War and spent six months in prison afterwards. At a time when overt protest to the government of General Franco could get you into unspeakable trouble, the Maestro always put the colors of the Republican flag in his rosettes until the day he died.

Since then, I got what I wished for.......

It has been just about four decades since my life in the guitar shop in Spain. For the most part, I have spent my life at the workbench having made just shy of 500 instruments. Even if my training was primarily in the construction of classical and flamenco guitars, over the years I became interested in a variety of stringed instruments. This divergence began with my discovery of Django Reinhardt, his music, and especially the guitar he played.

While in London in 1968, I located an original Maccaferri guitar complete with interior soundbox; I was given permission to make drawings of the instrument and take as many measurements as I could. That encounter started me on a lifelong vocation of finding out exactly how a guitar with an interior enclosed soundbox and reflector worked. This concept, more than anything else in my 40-year navigation of the instrument world, has kept me awake nights and given me nightmares and hangovers.
There were several interesting stops along the way. I shared a shop at one point with Ray Nurse, a world-renowned maker of early instruments. From him, I learned how to build lutes and from the 70's to the mid 80's, I constructed about 35 lutes. Things really got insane when I teamed up with long-time friend and woodworking colleague Ted Turner, to construct three historical harpsichords for the Vancouver Society for Early Music. The first two were single-manual instruments and the third was a double-manual French harpsichord with 3 sets of strings.

I have never encountered any single aspect of life which would age anyone more quickly than constructing a double-keyboard set in which one keyboard sits on rails above the other and can be pushed in or pulled out by ½ inch to engage the other one to operate together, so that by playing the lower keyboard the top one works in tandem with it, thereby playing all 3 sets of strings. Each keyboard had 60 keys, so all I can say is, "Never again!"

I have tried to walk the fine line between tradition and innovation. There are stumbling blocks along this path, things like marketing classical guitars. The classical guitar is the only type of guitar that has to be sold twice- once to the teacher and once to the student. No matter how good you feel the guitar is, if the classical guitar teacher in all his subjective wisdom doesn't like it, then the student (who may really like it) buys it at his peril. Teachers don't like students second-guessing them.

It was a little different with the Renaissance lutes I built as there were hardly any teachers and even less competition. Yamaha just didn't make them! Lutenists were firmly grounded in the tradition, even if the tradition shifted around a little. By this, I mean that lute making became somewhat enslaved to a certain fashion. As lutes were faithfully copied from originals in museums in Europe, "new" examples to emulate were constantly being discovered; copies of the current latest discovery were "in" and it became very time-consuming to keep up with it all.

In the end, it was the world of the Gypsy guitar which has kept me going. Mario Maccaferri invented his guitar around 1930. He patented the interior soundbox at that time and contracted Selmer to build the guitars with himself as the shop foreman. This went on until about 1933 when Maccaferri and Selmer went through a contractual dispute. Maccaferri left Selmer and Selmer then re-designed the guitar by removing the interior soundbox, going to the small oval soundhole, and lengthening the scale from 640mm to 670mm, effectively circumventing Maccaferri's patent; Selmer continued production of this redesigned instrument until 1952.

The "D-hole" was featured primarily on guitars with interior soundboxes, and the upper part of the D accommodated the reflector. The D-hole guitars were favored by rhythm players because they were very efficient and responsive in the midrange where all the chords are played. The oval-hole models generally had a more "singing" tone, i.e.- a little sweeter.

Today, 99% of all D-hole guitars are made without any soundboxes inside. They are also a bit more response in the midrange and are still favored by rhythm guitarists. The large opening (whatever the actual shape) lowers the resonant frequency of the box, which again favors the midrange. The shape is not nearly as important as the area of opening. I have specialized in guitars with interior soundboxes for most of my career, having started my work where Maccaferri left off. The Mystery Pacific and Ultrafox models are the result of my years of research on this style of guitar.

My experiments with interior the soundboxes of these instruments had opened up a whole new world for me. Since there are no real long-time traditions to flaunt with the Gypsy guitar, I set about giving myself carte blanche in bringing the Gypsy guitar into modern times.

For the first several years, I didn't have a lot of information to go on and for the most part, I was guided by trying to extrapolate the guitar sound from the sounds on Django Reinhardt's records. Having listened to the 30+ vinyl albums in my collection 'till it was coming out of my ears, I correlated Django's sounds with factors like soundboard thickness, bracing patterns etc. The real revelations came when I got hold of some 78rpm records in good condition. Recording technique in Django's time was of very high quality. The weak link in the chain was the playback, as the records wore out quickly and became plagued with static and scratches. But the sound was there and it was the last piece of the puzzle.

Transcribing the old 78s to vinyl and then to CD resulted in a great loss in the original sound quality. I have made an instructional DVD called Django's Rhythm which involved lots of listening to everything I had; I have to say that if I had only had modern CDs to go by, I would never have been able to complete this project; too much would have been muddled up and lost.

In the last ten years, I have settled on making about 8 different models of Gypsy jazz guitars, none of which are constructed like the original Selmers and Maccaferris. By now, I have played and heard lots of traditionally built Gypsy guitars, both solid and laminated, and I don't particularly care for a lot of them. The top end generally sounds a little thin and tinny and I've always tried to give my guitars a wide range of response so that they can be used to play all kinds of music from Gypsy jazz to fingerpicking. My job as a luthier is to make the instrument balanced and responsive. The player will use the instrument to create the sound he or she wants. A good instrument should be able to sound five different ways in the hands of five different players.

I continue to experiment constantly. I try out a new idea by constructing a prototype and playing it myself in gigs until I'm sure it works. I'm always playing in one band or another, so I get to try things out in every conceivable practical musical situation. My playing has taught me as much about guitar making as any other factor in learning the art.

Recently, I have become enamored with the work of Chris Knutsen and Hermann Weissenborn. This has resulted in my building Hawaiian guitars, harp guitars and harp-ukuleles. At one time or another Baroque guitars, Greek bouzoukis, vihuelas, a South American harp, several African instruments, archtop guitars, Appalacian dulcimers, a bass viola da gamba and even one banjo have all left my workbench.

The latter half on the 20th century has seen the emergence of a truly golden age of luthiery, both in North America and Europe. At no other point in the history of the craft has the world seen such diversity in instruments and the quality of artistic craftsmanship. I don't mean to denigrate the art of the former greats in the field by any means, for it is from them that we have learned what to do and what not to do. The sheer volume of artistic luthiery being produced in workshops, garages, basements, and sheds is astounding. An evening of web browsing will attest to this.

I often wonder what Maestro Orti would think if he could see us now.......

Michael Dunn
New Westminster, Canada 2004

To learn more about the art of Michael Dunn, please visit his website at:
www.michaeldunnguitars.com/.