I’ve been building guitars for 22 years. I started out building flamenco guitars, which are my first real love. I still play them. Flamenco sank its harpoon into me early on and hasn’t let go; it’s a wonderful music.

The flamenco crowd, I soon learned, is not able to support a luthier. They have enough money to buy themselves Gaulois cigarettes, but that’s about it. The next logical step was to make classic guitars. I quickly found that the classical players are, to the luthier, not a very user-friendly group. They are picky and critical, and since I basically didn’t know what I was doing I found it impossible to please them. It was not a happy...