Bert:   "It's a well known phenomenon called 'Peter's Placebo' which states that 'An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance.'"

Indeed!   Back in the early 1970s, I dropped into The Rosewood Guitar in Seattle, a shop that handles only the finest quality classic guitars. They did have good quality "student guitars" there that sold for around $300 on up, but you could drop $3,000 on up in that shop quite easily. But you'd leave with a guitar that you could walk out on a concert stage with and feel well equipped.

Steve Novacek (himself a concert guitarist with a couple of records out) and I sat around one afternoon trying out a shipment of student guitars he'd just got in. I was looking for a "second guitar" that would be good enough to use for performances, but not so expensive that it couldn't be replaced fairly easily. Steve and I agreed on one as sounding the best of the whole lot, a Japanese-made "Guitarra Artisana," imported as a student guitar by José Oribé of San Diego, a luthier who made fairly pricey concert quality guitars. A darn nice sounding, nice playing instrument for $350, plus $50 for a good hard-shell case.

Following the practice of many of the Japanese guitar makers at the time, the "Artisana" looked exactly like the José Ramirez concert guitar that Andrés Segovia was playing at the time. Red cedar soundboard, Brazilian rosewood back and sides, and the inlay work around the soundhole and the shape of the headstock were exactly the same as those of a Ramirez.

I'm a member of the Seattle Classic Guitar society, and one evening, for a change of pace at their monthly meetings, they asked me to sing a program of folk songs and ballads. I accompanied myself on my nice, shiny new Japanese-made imitation Ramirez.

There was a lot of high-priced wood floating around those meetings, and a number of members owned the same model Ramirez that Segovia played.

My new guitar sounded darned good from the stage, and I was most pleased with it. And since it sounded full and mellow, and it looked exactly like a Ramirez, everybody—including the Ramirez owners—automatically assumed that it was a Ramirez.

Considering that the Ramirez ran around $3500 at the time and my guitar had cost $350, and people couldn't tell them apart unless they looked through the soundhole and read the label, I'd say that was a pretty good buy!

Still got it. Still sounds great! Very nice instrument. Especially so, considering what I paid for it!

Don Firth