|
Guest -> A Guitar (Feb. 21 2004 8:43:44)
|
A story from a silent friday in the guitar shop where I work, a rainy morning in Granada:
In comes Mr X with a guitar he wants to sell. Not to us, but privately in Madrid or in the states. Places with more money. But he wants a checkout to know the costs of a reparation before he puts the thing for sale.
The guitar comes to light. An orange 1969 Conde Hermanos Cypress from the shop of Faustino in Atocha. That´s what the label says, and that´s probably what it is. It doesn´t have any signature, and I´m dead sure the thing was never made or supervised by the master himself. The guitar is VERY light, and thats probably the reason for i´ts very poor state. The backreinforcement is 1mm by 5mm and of Cedar, and of course, the gluejoint hasn´t survived this silly way of loosing weight. It´s open all the way from the heel to the bottomblock. The back itself has taken some strange deviations of its intented radius. The SB has a crack at the side of the fingerboard, but this can be fixed. But now to the shocking part. The neck.. Flatsawn from some very light piece of wood, probably cyprees or another lightweight wood which has been coloured brown.
The guitar is, well a guitar, and the owner thinks it´s worth a lot. Some 3000+ $.
I just wanna say that in these years, the 60 and 70. where there where a sudden need for flamencoguitars, most guitarbuilders (Bellido, Marin etc) from Granada made fast and cheap guitars for the Atocha shop and most of the other big Madrid makers. I have no idea about the percentage, but it´s high.
So the moral is. Take good care when you wanna buy one of these guitars, because they are not worth ****.
An afterstory. Might be that a lot of the good Madrid guitars went to the states, like a lot of other quality craft from Europe, and that the bad ones stayed here. That´s very possible, but look out anyway.
Nice playing
Anders
|
|
|
|
