How much guitar do you need?

During the late Seventies, I dropped into the Rosewood Guitar in Seattle fairly often. The Rosewood Guitar stocks the finest quality classic guitars, ones that sell for $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, and up. They also handle a line of carefully selected "student guitars."—good sounding, nice playing guitars for a whole lot less.

So I've had a chance to play some incredible concert quality guitars and drool all over them. But having to stick to the budget, after playing a top-of-the-line José Ramirez (one helluva guitar!), I checked the student guitars. The proprietor of the shop (who concretizes and teaches) and I spent a fair amount of time passing several student guitars back and forth and playing them, and finally we both came to the same conclusion:   all five of them were pretty good, but a Japanese-made "Guitarra Artesana" imported by José Oribé was the best of the litter. One little bonus point was that it looked exactly like the Ramirez I had lusted after—Indian rosewood back and sides and red cedar soundboard, and the headstock was exactly the same cut as the Ramirez, with almost identical inlay work around the soundhole. It had a big sound, a nice, warm tone, good balance between bass and treble, and it felt very good to play. The price was $350.00. I bought it.

Some months later, I was asked by the Seattle Classic Guitar Society to do a program of folk songs and play a few classical pieces for one of their meetings. These folks know classic guitars and some of them own top quality instruments. There are a couple concert Ramirezes that appear at meetings from time to time.

As I said, my Oribé-imported "Guitarra Artesana" looks exactly like a Ramirez. They assumed that it was a Ramirez, and its sound was good enough for their sophisticated ears that it did not disabuse them of the notion! Not bad for a $350.00 "student guitar."

I'm no authority on steel-string guitars, but I've played a number of Takamines now and then and I've listened to a lot of them, and they seemed to me to measure up pretty well.

For what it's worth.

Don Firth