Let us turn to the past

Torniamo all'antico e sarà un progresso

--Giuseppe Verdi

That phrase translates as "let us turn to the past and that will be progress." Interesting thought. In my case, today, that means noticing that my guitar is forty years old this year. I bought it in 1983 from Robert Holroyd in Vancouver. I've told this story before, but I'll add some details this time. But first, here is the instrument in question:

Click to enlarge

I just took that photo. As you can see if you look closely, I'm just in the middle of putting new strings on. They are all on, but I haven't cut off the excess at the pegbox. No, you don't need to spend half your life winding all that excess length on.

How did I come to buy the guitar? At the time I was playing a Masaru Kohno guitar that I quite liked. That was my second concert guitar, the first being a José Ramirez I bought in Madrid. One day a good friend of mine called me and said that a builder he knew had just finished a guitar and it was going to be sitting in his shop for a few days before the buyer picked it up. "You have to try it!" he said. So I did. After five minutes I knew I wanted it. It was fantastically in tune everywhere on the fingerboard. Very clear and open sound and the basses were terrific and defined. If you look at the photo you can see that the bridge is very unusual. It is a wide, but slim, piece of ebony with no actual "bridge" (usually a strip of ivory or plastic over which the strings pass). Instead, the strings are fed through narrow holes drilled in the ebony and then pass over six individual tool steel posts. You have to make a knot in the end so they don't slip. This is a "Neil Hiebert" bridge, named after the Montreal guitar builder who came up with it. He and Robert Holroyd spent a lot of time on the phone in the early 80s talking about guitar design and this is one of the things they came up with. The internal strutting is also very different.

As soon as I played it I asked Bob for his next guitar which he finished three months later. He only built about four guitars a year. I didn't have any money so I had to get a loan from my credit union to buy it: $3,000 Canadian dollars which, back then, were pretty much even with US dollars. The collateral to support the loan? A photocopy of my bachelor's degree from McGill University. Mind you, it was hand written in Latin on parchment.

With apologies to my ex-wife, I guess this guitar is the true love of my life. I have been married once, had many girlfriends, lived in three and a half countries and had three important teaching jobs. But always the same guitar which has undergone one major repair and one complete restoration and is due for another.

It's a great guitar. Pepe Romero tried it out when I was in his master-class in Salzburg and later bought one for himself. I have tried out a lot of guitars: Manuel Barrueco's Ruck included, plus a number of Ramirez guitars, a lovely Daniel Friedrich, lots by Canadian builders and lots I can't even remember. I haven't played a Greg Smallman, but that aside, I suspect that this is pretty much as good as guitars get.

Let's hear it. This is a Venezuelan waltz by Antonio Lauro: Carora.