It was my turn to play my introductory piece for the maestro. As I began, my conscious mind rose up a few feet above me and observed my fingers struggling to keep pace with the succession of notes. Despite fluffing a few I managed to reach the end intact and slumped back, relieved that I had, while not exactly distinguishing myself, at least survived. He asked to see my guitar, examined it and played a few phrases with a perplexed look. In a roundabout manner he hinted that while functional, it was a student model and perhaps I should get a better instrument. This could be taken as either praise for my playing or denigration of the guitar, or a combination of the two.

Another student had a 1930’s cypress bodied Domingo Esteso which had a sound that I could only describe as all music. The students were all looking at each other as if to say, ‘did you hear That?’. The maestro looked the instrument over, and said that while Esteso was a great maker and this was a fine guitar, he should consider getting a proper guitarra classica made with rosewood if he wanted to be taken seriously.

Another student played his introductory piece on a 1929 Francisco Simplicio, who was the successor to Enrique Garcia, the great Barcelona builder. With its ornately carved head, complex rose and a huge breathy sound exuding ancient mysteries, this guitar also got the ‘did you hear That?’ look. The maestro looked it over with his concentrated squint and pronounced that, again, while Simplicio was also one of the best makers, the back and sides were mahogany and perhaps it was getting a little old.

From this I deduced that the proper guitar should be reasonably fresh, made of rosewood and made with professional use in mind. How different from the violin world, where showing up with an eighteenth century fiddle is applauded.

Unlike the flamenco guitar with it’s narrowly defined repertoire and cultural niche, widening though it might be, the classic guitar is asked to span a range from the Renaissance to the avant garde with repertoire covering everything from Andean dance music to concerti with orchestra. It is asked to perform in huge halls for hundreds of sound absorbing bodies, to intimate gatherings in lively rooms or out of doors with amplification. Despite the ‘classic’ moniker, it is used for latin jazz and song accompaniment and even played with a thumb pick or fitted with a pickup and plugged in.

Given this situation, it is impossible to say any given instrument, no matter how ‘perfect’, is the best or most perfect classic guitar. As a student I roomed with two others, one of whom had a rather large Italian Raponi cedar  top with a deep and portentious manner and the other a delicate and elegant English made Jones guitar, which I at first thought to  be rather ineffective until I realized it was everything the Raponi wasn’t and vice versa. Each suited its owner perfectly yet neither could see what the other saw in his instrument. A comedy of opposites.

As if this sort of situation wasn’t confusing enough, in the last decade the development of lattice bracing and ‘double top’ construction has opened a new option which many influential players have adopted. By reducing the mass of the top and engineering more control over stiffness to weight, the response of the top to the string has been increased, and thus the power and projection heretofore only available to those with strong technique now been made available with less effort. Because this is still relatively uncharted territory, not all attempts at using these techniques have been a success, but recent models seem to be establishing a more evolved and stable model.

I’ve been content to observe these new developments. I seem to have the same intuitive skills as other builders and also all the physics background needed to approach construction either way. But for me it is a matter of passion. There’s a strong cultural meaning for me to play an instrument that connects me to music. It isn’t just numbers or readouts but dramas and scenes and emotions that are the strengths of the classic guitar. Up to now I have found the new methods and materials at times impressive but not yet personally expressive.

For the vast majority of players the performance of their guitar in a large hall before hundreds of people is theoretical because the situation won’t arise. Small groups and gatherings will be the largest situation encountered, in which case the ‘best’ guitar for large halls might be out of its element. Nevertheless, players whose talents and directions will never include large halls still purchase instruments that are what their heroes play in order to have the official sound on the record. For a time, every student seemed to buy a Ramirez Ia professional guitar as a right of passage despite the ultra long string length, wide spacing and high action that Segovia with his large strong hands found natural but induced tendonitis in most everyone else.

My choice for the ‘essential’ classic guitar is the style of instrument considered professional in the first half of the 20th century. Many pros are returning to it. The majority of the repertoire was written for it and it is more compatible with the actual ‘classical’ repertoire of Sor and Giuliani and the baroque. For me this is the universal guitar. It does more things well and sounds right for more different types and situations of music plus is now a fully evolved and time tested entity. Not too light nor too heavy, too big or too small, too deep or too shrill, it is that universal middle point. It sounds easy to make but the reality is that it is easier to make an instrument with an outstanding and impressive quality or two than to make one in which all the elements are in balance awaiting the players direction.

Indeed, this is one of the main reasons why players change instruments so often. The one they have is fine for playing a certain type of music but their repertoire changed. The guitar that was so wonderful for Bach seems sterile for playing Barrios. Rather than play a neutral guitar and learn how to adjust their technique to draw the different period characteristics from it, they are faced with having either a brace of guitars behind them or a serial guitar adjustment problem. All too often, the maker is seen as the deficiency as in,  ‘It’s a pretty good guitar but wait until I get my new Suchnsuch’ . The Suchnsuch will be later dismissed as lacking in something but the new Sowenso on order will be the ultimate. While good for business and providing a steady stream of used instruments, the judgments made about builders can be rather unfair and more a reflection of the customer than the craftsman.

My position in this is that of trying to get the right instrument in the hands of the player. If your passion is Tarrega and that’s the era you mostly play, it is folly to have a heavy and stiff instrument designed to play a modern concerto in a hall just because that is what is in style or the must have guitar at the moment. If your hands are small, having a shorter scale and narrower spacing will accommodate that and, despite any mythology to the contrary, will not in any way diminish the guitar’s output. One of the fascinating things about the ‘guitarra classica’ is the wide range of interpretations of what it should be which have resulted in a richness of choice and style not found in most types of instrument. I’m still fascinated.