Posts Tagged ‘perez’
Capital Visits GSI
Capital is a protegé of the legendary Brazilian composer/guitarist Guinga – Guinga even wrote a song for him called ‘Capital’. He came in last week and played a bunch of guitars, so I’ll be posting videos for the next few weeks. Here he is playing Guinga’s ‘Picotado’ on a Teodoro Perez ‘Especial Maple’ and ‘Capital’, the song written for him by Guinga, on a Thomas Norwood ’1910 Manuel Ramirez’ model. You can find out more about Capital’s schedule and ‘Like’ him over on his facebook page. He’s also teaching at this Summer’s ‘California Brazil Camp‘, which is an amazing place to immerse yourself in Brazilian music and which has an amazing faculty.
Tom Farrell is an L.A. based guitarist who in addition to being a classical guitarist is one half of Duo Del Sol with violinist Javier Orman and one eighth of the Los Angeles Electric 8 (as is our own JohnPaul Trotter). Tom has also been practicing Yoga for ten years now, and we’ve been talking about doing some Yoga videos for a while, since so many guitarists neglect stretching and basic maintenance of the body and experience pain as a result. The first two videos are of Tom playing and the third is of him explaining some basic breathing and stretching techniques that might work for guitarists (or anyone, really) without taking up too much time. He’s been playing on the floor lately, instead of using a chair, which is probably great for your back if you can get your legs to do that…
We met Ricardo Giuffrida at the Marc Teicholz concert a few weeks back, and I remember him telling me that some of the great Brazilian guitarist/composers had serious day jobs. In particular he mentioned that Guinga had been a dentist (I had no idea). Then it turns out that Ricardo is also a doctor who plays (Ricardo is from Brazil, so maybe it’s a Brazilian thing) and he doesn’t just play a little. So when he came back to the showroom last week we had to shoot some videos of him playing some great Brazilian classics and one of his own compositions, which is pretty impressive. So here are some great videos of Ricardo, doing what he does when he’s not doctoring.
Here’s more of Teodoro Perez talking about the importance of wood. I love talking to Teodoro because of his connection with the past at Ramirez and his connection with the future – his kids are in the shop working side by side with him. And he just never stops working for a moment, so he’s binding a guitar while talking to me here.
LeChic Duo is Iren Arutyunyan and Sofia Gleeson and they stopped by to play for us this week. They played Albeniz’ ‘Cordoba’ as transcribed for two guitars by Emil Pujol and Sokolov’s ‘Polka’ as arranged by Sergei Orekhov. Sofia played a Tobias Berg cedar-top and Iren played a Tobias Braun satinwood guitar and a Teodoro Perez Concierto cedar-top.
LeChic Duo also has a music video coming out at the end of this month, and I’ve posted the trailer here as well.
We’re celebrating the Madrid school throughout the month of November. Just buy any guitar from a Madrid maker (Contreras, Ramirez, Perez or Conde) and we’ll give you a shopping spree worth 10% of the purchase price of your guitar – and there’s no limit. You can use that 10% shopping spree to buy anything on the site – from strings to cases or furniture or even another guitar. Just give us a call or we’ll email you instructions on how to redeem you shopping spree. Cannot be combined with any other offer.
There’s a story (no idea if it’s true) that when Antonio de Torres was on his deathbed someone said to him “you can’t die without telling us your secrets” and he sort of rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and said “the secret is here”, the point being that feeling the wood between those two fingers and knowing which wood was right was the whole ‘secret’ of making great guitars. Looking through the videos I shot with luthiers in Spain a few weeks ago I started to notice that everyone is talking about resins and crystallization and the ‘secret’ of choosing good wood.
So I put together a few clips of those conversations, because I love how these guys make guitars day in day out, have huge stocks of wood, and yet they just obsess about it. Here are Teodoro Perez and Graciliano Perez talking about their obsession.
I love watching Teodoro Perez work. Partly, because he can’t help it. He’ll stop to talk and his hands just sort of wander over to some job that needs doing and do it. Looking over the videos I shot with him I realized that in the 10 or so minutes we were talking about something or other he had completed the binding on another guitar. I figured most people wouldn’t spend 10 minutes watching this, so I sped up the video and now it’s just 3 minutes long. Music is Marc Teicholz playing ‘Esmeralda’s Waltz’ by Dusan Bogdanovich.
When I started doing these videos almost a year and a half ago I didn’t know nearly as much about classical guitars and makers as I did about flamencos, but after hearing hundreds of guitars played by amazing players I feel like I have a pretty good grasp now of what to look for in a classical guitar, too. One of the things I’ve noticed is that I consistently like the Teodoro Perez guitars. Even when comparing them to some of the most expensive and famous guitars around, they always hold their own, and often they’re the players’ top choice.
So, just for fun, I thought I’d do a compilation post of some of the great recordings we’ve done withPerez guitars in the last year or so, and include a little interview with Perez I did at his shop in Madrid.
Our good friend Yury Nugmanov was here all week shooting a documentary about the guitar for Russian TV. The two main things they had to shoot for the film were his visit with Pepe Romero down in San Diego, and his visit to GSI, where he got his beloved Miguel Rodriguez a few years back.
Probably the reason Yury is so good is that he literally can’t put down the guitar. More than pretty much any guitarist I know, he just never stops playing, so we knew he’d be good for some videos as he played a bunch of our guitars. There are more to come, but here are the first three:
