Soul Music : Guitar Maker’s Simple Methods Give His Instruments Personality, Players Say

German Vasquez earns his living by clutching untamed wood with thick fingers and carving out instruments that resonate with his soul.

He has been doing this for 30 of his 43 years, becoming one of the leading makers of classical and flamenco guitars in Southern California.

Like many residents of his native Mexican town of Paracho, Vasquez was introduced to the art of making stringed instruments about the same time he learned to tie his shoelaces.

But he is one of a few endowed with the patience and conviction to branch out from the colorful mariachi pieces of his homeland to more subtle flamenco and classical guitar creations.

“If you listen to a line [of guitars] like German’s . . . it has a very romantic sound to it,” said John Silva of Guitar Salon International in Santa Monica, a leading dealer that carries Vasquez’s guitars. “It makes you want to curl up inside the instrument and listen. You can hear the personality of this soft-spoken, gentle man in the instrument.”

Vasquez makes his instruments in an apartment in the Pico-Union district, west of downtown, next door to the unit he shares with his wife and their three children.

He is an average-size man with black matted hair and deep black eyes that seem to pierce the wood when he gazes down the neck of a guitar, looking for any signs of warping.

“You can never replace a guitar made by hand with one made by machines,” he said inside his shop the other day. “It will not have the same sweet sound that comes from creating something from the heart.”

Vasquez, who came to the United States about three years ago, has spent $2,000 on lessons in his craft, both here and in Mexico. Master luthiers, many of them European, often visited Vasquez’s hometown in the north-central state of Michoacan, amazed by the town’s reverence for the art.

Shortly after Spanish colonization, thousands of the town’s Indians were perishing in the conquerors’ copper mines, so the state’s empathetic first bishop, Vasco de Quiroga, decreed that each village take up a craft.

Some Michoacan villages made pottery, others leather goods or copper utensils, and Paracho became home of the luthiers.

Today, about one-third of the village’s breadwinners are involved with the construction of guitars. They use no jigs or power tools and rarely employ workbenches.

Instead, handsaws and handmade knives are their implements. They brace the guitar against their bodies as they work.

Despite the advice of European masters, who say he could be more productive with a few simple tools, Vasquez still makes his guitars this way.

“I don’t know how to do it right,” he jokes.

His method makes his instruments special, musicians say.

“His workmanship is very considerate,” said Miguel Espinoza, a formally trained guitarist with the flamenco recording group Curandero. “A friend loaned me one of German’s guitars before German’s work had become known. I took it for a weekend and told him, ‘You’re never getting it back.’ ”

The luthier’s steady knife, its handle wrapped by sweat-stained masking tape, peels curly shreds of wood off the neck and the heel connecting it to the body.

“When I first started, I cut myself badly here and here,” he said, first pointing the blade to his free hand’s index finger, then his left thigh. “But I haven’t done that in years.”

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He said it is difficult to estimate how many guitars he makes annually because the pace is affected by such factors as the availability of Spanish cedar and the natural glue from his homeland. But guitar makers on average make about one instrument a month.

He gets about a 65% cut from sales. His least expensive instrument is a $1,500 student model, the most costly a $4,500 advanced model of Brazilian rosewood. His earnings are determined by several factors. For example, a dealer might pay for his materials and compensate by granting less of a cut.

Vasquez is satisfied that he and his wife are able to give their children things he never had.

“I came here to give my family a better life,” he said. “And to make guitars.”