a guitar from Valencia

Pirate luthier adventures continued with a detour into guitar territory:

I try to bat away most instruments that aren't from the violin family, but accepted to restore this guitar which looked really cute and was in need of frets, inlays, and a nut when it came to me. I managed to fit in all of these vaguely in the right places, so now it looks like a guitar and sounds like a guitar, although I wouldn't guarantee that all notes will be 100% in tune.

It has a maker's label, but unfortunately, a Swiss company importing the instrument from Spain insisted on sticking its own label right across the more interesting one telling us who made the instrument.

Update: Scratch my guesswork - a helpful Mastodon user from Valencia cracked the secret. The guitar maker was Jose Cortes, and you can see examples of his labels here (ignore the first image which is an unrelated label). The label reads then:

Manufactura de Guitarras /
E Instrumentos Similares /
J. Cortés /
Continuacion de Jorje Juan, D.N. /
Valencia /
(Espana)

Jose Cortes was active from around 1910 till 1930, and from 1925 the street appears under its new name as calle Joaquin Costa on his labels, so we can now confidently say the guitar is at least 100 years old. More info about him here.

I'm loving the rich decoration around the sound hole and around the edges, which looks a little bit irregular and home-made, but very charmingly so.

The instrument has now returned to its owner who has had it for more than half a century.

Update: While attempting to track down the maker in Valencia, I looked up the trader, Hug & Co, and it turns out they have an interesting history too, spanning more than 200 years, and they're still in business today. A quick look seems to suggest they traded as Hug & Co from 1905 until 1973.

Normal service obsessing about violins will resume soon, as violin number 24 has arrived on the premises this week.

blue notes

All our instruments series, episode 2


After Heinrich the cello and a tuba mouthpiece sadly lacking the rest of the instrument, the next longest serving instrument in my house is a Hopf classical guitar which turned 50 last summer. This is a precise dating, as my cousin got it as a birthday present back in 1968. I've been playing it badly since the mid-1970s, but less regularly since I started to toot a flute, back in 1999. However, I did play a few notes on it at the Misa Campesina 2017.

On the occasion of its 50th birthday, the young stringplayer named it Blue, and as that refers to the figure Johnny Blue in the eponymous song, I suspect it's henceforth a he. Here's a portrait of Blue and yours truly, taken back in 2012:




And here's the video of a few notes I can still remember after 20 years of not playing very much ...




It includes the intro to a song by Reinhard Mey, then a piece I learned from a guitar magazine under the title of Shake that thing, but googling that title now leads to a different piece, and finally a failed attempt to remember Fuer Elise - I had a nice guitar score for that but appear to have lost it.