Tom Blackshear -> RE: My Faustino Conde story (Sep. 4 2020 13:34:24)
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To answer Tom, Ricardo Sanchis worked consistently for the Gravina and Atocha shop from mid nineties. He was also among those making the Felipe V first class guitars but just few of them and just for few years. Sanchis used to take care of the varnishing process. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Tom, In response to your comments above, it strikes me that a Sanchis model A-26 would have been a student model. I believe that during that time, Sanchis still had some employees so my best guess is that he did not build the guitar himself. It was most likely built by an employee. Ricardo himself would have made the design, and sprayed the finish, as well as doing some of the high skill steps but I suspect just by knowing the organization of his operation at the time that he personally had only a small part in the building of the instrument himself. This would be even more so the case if the label reads Ricardo Sanchis Carpio and not Hermanos Sanchis Lopez. Somewhere back in those days the name on the label was changed, looking forward to the time when the son's would take over with the inevitable march in time. That way the son's names would be better established when he would be forced to lay down his tools. At the time, it strikes me that his shop was producing a minimum of 200 guitars a year and most likely not more than 350 guitars a year...that is all a wild guess. I stopped importing his guitars in 2007 and he still had employees at that time. Whether either of his son's had a hand in the building is still anybody's guess. I was not closely following his flamenco work since I am a classical guitarist and had contacts for the sale of the classical models. When I started with him, his classical models were, 3a , 2a, 1a. the 3a had a laminated back and was very much a student instrument. later he introduced a model 1a-b which was above the 2a, but below the 1a and changed the 1a to the 1a EXTRA and if it was in Brazialian rosewood it would be the 1a-EXTRA-R or maybe the 1a-R. He eventually dropped the 3a model probably about the time that his sons started working in the shop while they were still apprentices. Eventually he dropped everything less than the 1a-b. I know that he had many flamenco models. I am not acquainted with the A-26 model specifically, but it would have been one of the lower if not the lowest model and I think that the models changed names from time to time. My best guess is that this would have been on the level of the 2a or 3a in the classical models His more serious models in flamenco would have been the 1a-F which would have been on the level of the 1a-b in classical and the 1a-EXTRA-F or it might have been the 1a-F-EXTRA which would have been at the level of the 1a-EXTRA in classical. After 2007 and I do not know exactly when, his last employee retired and it became an operation of just him and his son's. At that time the model that Ricardo Sanchis himself would have made was known as the model "RSC" for Ricardo Sanchis Carpio. The "a" after the numbers is simply the spanish equivalent of 1st, 2nd,3rd, 4th etc. but in Spanish is is all a. The comparison made on the chat is to me simply saying that Arcangel Fernandes is better than a student guitar. That's not rocket science! That the comparison would even dare to be made demonstrates to me the true power of the name thatA-26 Sanchis has been able to develop over the years. He simply was the most experienced and most prolific Spanish Guitar maker of all time. When he finally came down to building only top quality guitars, he eventually made a special order for Paco de Lucia, who called him and asked for a special kind of sound which he was able to produce and was used on one of Paco's final recordings if not his very last. There is my best answer to the question about the Question about the Sanchis A-26.
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