Flamenco guitar Sergio Valverde Castillo 2022 (Sequoia)

This flamenco guitar was built by luthier Sergio Valverde Castillo in 2022. Sergio Valverde Castillo has great experience working with wood: he learnt cabinetmaking and carpentry at the school workshop in Adra (Almeria) in 1998. Since then, he has always been working with wood and doing all kinds of carpentry, furniture, inlay and artistic works. His passion for music and musical instruments made him change his professional path and dedicate his skill with wood and his knowledge to build guitars and other stringed instruments such as the lute and the bandurria. He owes his knowledge as a guitar maker to the masters Stephen Hill and Pablo Requena and, subsequently, to the master Jesús Bellido and his family, who taught him everything he knows about lutes and bandurrias and let him use their original templates and moulds. In 2002, he opened his own workshop in Mecina Bombarón, a small village in La Alpujarra (Granada).

This is the first guitar we have received from Sergio Valverde built with sequoia wood hat we acquired a few months ago and that we distributed among the best guitar makers so that they could build guitars of superior quality for us, exclusive and unique. (YOU CAN ACCESS THE NEWS BY CLICKING HERE). The result has beaten our high expectations by far: an instrument of the highest quality in every sense, with a sound capable of surprising the most demanding guitarist. Sequoia has certain acoustic characteristics that make it one of the best woods to use for flamenco guitars, due to the shape and distribution of its grain and the crystallisation of its interior fibres and resins, which achieve a timbre that resembles the speed and clarity of cedar’s but with the sweetness and bass closer to spruce-pine’s.  The combination of Brazilian rosewood (with its corresponding CITES documentation) and sequoia, as we have commented on other occasions, is a safe bet which guarantees a big, clear sound with projection. These are qualities which a great concert guitar must have, and this is precisely what this instrument offers us in abundance.

The tension of this flamenco guitar is medium, and the height of strings in saddle and fingerboard is reduced. The fluidity with which the left hand works across the fingerboard together with the comfort of the touch of the right hand, thanks to a marked ‘rebound effect’, make it one of the most comfortable guitars we have tried.

The condition of this flamenco guitar is brand new.