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rletson -> RE: Why are flamenco guitars so expensive? (Nov. 19 2014 2:39:21)
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Price reflects both demand and the cost of production. I don't have specific knowledge of the latter in the flamenco field, but I do have several friends who have built steel-strings for years, and what I heard from them was that there is about 100 hours of labor in a flat-top guitar, and substantially more in an archtop. So even before we get to cost of materials and overhead, you can see that a $3000 single-builder guitar pays the luthier $30/hour. This is why a $3000 flat-top is quite a bargain, and why so many builders have spouses with straight jobs (preferably with medical benefits) and/or also do repair and restoration work to keep the lights on. (And why the going price for a single-builder or even small-shop flat-top from an established builder is now well north of $4000. Check, say, James Goodall's prices.)
One of my friends finally quit building, after producing sixty-some instruments over an 22-year period, because it was not economically viable. "I just wanted to make a wage," he told me. But he couldn't, even though he produced very fine instruments. I did my part--I own two.
As I say, I'm anything but an authority on flamenco guitars, but I have played guitar-in-general for more than fifty years, and what I think I see in this subculture is a need for instruments with very particular qualities--a much narrower range of "what works" than, say, the folk-world steel-string flat-top or even the swing-world acoustic archtop. More like what the gypsy-jazz guys look for in a Selmer-style guitar. That's a pretty small target for a builder to hit, and a relatively small market to sell into at the pro and even the serious-amateur level. I suspect those factors have a non-trivial effect on prices.
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