Maren Aske builds six guitars a year, alone, in a barn in Esker Ferry, New York. From $9,400, with an eighteen month wait.
In 2011 I sold my cello, bought a one-way ticket to Granada and talked my way into a three-person workshop on a street too steep for cars. For two years I swept, bent sides, and made rosettes nobody would ever see. The master tapped every top I thinned and handed it back until I could hear what he heard.
I came home in 2013 with a set of moulds, forty boards of Spanish cypress and the pattern I still build. Every guitar since has been made by me alone, from the first cut to the last coat of shellac.
A top goes from 4 mm to just over 2 by hand plane and scraper.
650 mm scale, from $9,400
The pattern I learned in Spain and have barely changed since: a seven-strut fan, a top taken down to 2.1 mm at the edges, and a mosaic rosette of a little over 3,000 tiles that I lay by hand in the winter months. It is the guitar for a concert hall and a full programme.
640 mm scale, from $9,400
The same body and bracing with a shorter string length, for smaller hands and for anyone whose left hand aches after long stretches in Villa-Lobos. The difference is ten millimetres and it costs nothing extra. Players usually cannot hear which is which.
I build with six woods, from 46 matched sets drying in the wood room, most for ten years or more. The price updates as you choose.
European spruce over Indian rosewood
The pairing I would keep if I could only build one. Spruce gives the clarity and the long life, rosewood fills in the bass and the room around each note. It starts a little reserved and keeps opening for years. Roughly half of the 71 guitars I have finished are this.
$600 over the base price of $9,400
$10,000
I will not take an order from someone who has not played my guitars. It protects you from buying a sound you imagined, and it protects me from building one.
Tell me what you play, what you play it on now, and where you live. I read every letter on Sunday and answer within the week.
Two hours in the showing room with three to five finished guitars, some mine and some borrowed back from their owners. You play, I listen and mostly stay quiet. There is no charge and no obligation.
Usually a few weeks later. We choose the woods from the library, the scale and the neck, and I measure your hands. A deposit of $2,500 puts your name in the book.
Your woods are set aside the day you order. When your guitar reaches the bench, about fourteen weeks of work, I send photographs at bracing, at closing the box, and on the day it is first strung.
You come back to play it for an afternoon before it goes home with you, and pay the balance then. Adjustments are free for the first two years, because a new top keeps moving.
The workshop is the old packing barn of an apple farm. The bench faces north, the wood room holds 45 per cent humidity all year, and the showing room has a chair, a footstool and a plaster wall that gives back a true sound.
I work Tuesday to Saturday. Visits are on Saturdays, one player at a time, and the kettle is always on. The barn is two hours from Manhattan by the Hudson line and a short taxi from the station.
I played seven guitars on my first visit and she wrote down which one I kept going back to. It was not the one I said I liked. No. 58 is the one I play in every recital now.
I am an amateur and I was nervous to write. She answered in four days with two pages about what I should listen for. The wait went quickly because of the photographs.
The bass on the Madagascar guitar filled the chapel at school without me pushing at all. My students ask to hold it before they ask anything else.
Sample quotes and players, shown for illustration.
Most people write first, and I prefer it: I can think about what you play before we talk. The phone sits on the bench and I pick it up at lunch, between twelve and one.