(exciting orchestral music) (strums rapidly) - Took up the violin at- I think it was around age nine.

My goal in life was to be able to play like Sandor Lakatos.

By the time I was 10 or 11 years old, I realized I was not going to be able to play violin like Sandor Lakatos and so I took up the guitar instead and taught myself to play flamenco.

(plucks guitar) But I couldn't afford to buy a guitar and so I decided I would make my own guitar.

When I announced this to my mom, she said, "Well, you probably need some old, dry wood for that, right?"

And I said, "Yeah, I could use that."

And so she said, "Well, you know your dad and I, when we got married back in the 30s, we had that old dining room table that's down in the basement now.

Why don't you cut that up?"

So, that's what I did and that's actually the sides and the back of this guitar.

I picked up a recording of Pepe Romero when he was 15 playing flamenco, which is what I play, and I realized he's 15 years old and if he can do that, I can do that.

It kind of went from there and I would go and take my extra money and I'd go buy records and then I would put them on my Magnavox and I'd slow them down to 16 rpm and try to pick off what they were doing and learn it on the guitar.

Flamenco- Although many people think it's a folkloric art form, it's not.

It's actually a very complex, classic- It's the classical music of the gypsies of southern Spain.

And so, everything in flamenco has a formal, correct way that it's done.

Unfortunately, I didn't know that so many of the things that I do when I play flamenco are wrong or reversed because I didn't have the benefit of seeing people doing these.

But I could hear it on the record and so I made my kind of left-handed, half-size metric techniques that I use work.

It's very powerful, emotional music.

It's not intellectual; it's direct from the heart.

Most of the time when I was making it, I was just making an instrument for myself and trying to improve on the last one that I'd made and there was a certain point in time when I got a call from somebody that I didn't know that said, "I wanna buy one of your guitars," that I realized that maybe, just maybe, this making thing might be the path instead of this playing thing.

Every time we make a guitar, we make it specifically for someone.

So, we need to know that musician and we need to know their music and we need to know what they like and what they don't like.

And lot of people ask, "You know, where do you get your wood from?"

and I always say, "Well, we get it mostly from other dead luthiers," and they say, "Oh, Richard, you're so funny."

But actually that's closer to the truth than anything.

Most luthiers, myself included, are wood hoarders and they buy wood like as if there's never going to be another tree growing.

When you're talking about a good or a bad guitar or good or bad sound, you could get five musicians in a room and get five different opinions about the same guitar.

Typically, I would make about two guitars in a month.

At my age now, I'm not at that pace nearly at all and that's because we do a lot more restoration work than we used to do.

My son, Marshall, who's a violin maker, grew up in the shop literally.

When he was very little, I would bring him to the shop and he had a little corner and I would give him a piece of wood and a hammer and stuff and he would go to it.

Once I showed him how to French polish, I gave him a guitar to finish and I told him I would pay him $500 to put the finish on it, which is actually a bargain for the amount of time it takes.

But at that point, he had been cutting our grass for, like, 10 bucks a pop and after he French polished the guitar and collected his money, he said, "You know, Dad, I can't be doing this lawn stuff anymore.

It's just not efficient for me to be making money.

I'm only gonna be French polishing guitars now and doing luthiery."

A luthier is a person who takes dead plants and he glues them together with dead animals because the glue is made from natural animal collagen.

We varnish them with the poop of dead bugs because that's what shellac is.

And that's all so that the musicians can play the music of dead composers.

Some people think this is a dying business but it's not.

I've made guitars for most of the greatest players in the world- for Andres Segovia, for Sabicas, for the Romeros, el Moraito de Jerez, everybody.

I would say my greatest thrill is seeing the greatest guitarists of the world playing on my guitars and knowing that I made a tool for them that was worthy.

(acoustic music)