Ramírez Guitars

Ramírez Guitars (Guitarras Ramírez in Spanish) is a Spanish manufacturer of professional, concert quality classical and flamenco guitars. Five generations of the Ramírez family have produced Ramirez guitars.

José Ramírez learned how to make guitars while an apprentice to Madrid guitar maker Francisco Gonzalez. Once he had finished his apprenticeship he left, and with his younger brother Manuel (1864 1916) opened a guitar making workshop in 1882 on Cava Baja in Madrid, before in 1890 moving to Calle de la Concepción Jerónima nº 2. Enrique Garcia (1868 1922), who began an apprenticeship with José Ramírez brothers in 1883, joined Manuel. The workshop took some time to attract customers, which led Manuel to bring in income by working for a period as an electrician for the Madrid Electric Company, leaving the workshop in the hands of Garcia. As a result, he began producing guitars that had a lighter, delicate sound, that became popular within the flamenco community. By 1912, Manuel Ramírez had been appointed luthier to the National Conservatoire in Madrid. In 1912 a young Andrés Segovia visited Manuel with a request to rent a guitar for a concert. After hearing him play, Manuel gave him the guitar, which had been largely made by Hernandez. Segovia used the guitar in concerts and on recordings from 1912 to 1937, and played it at his United States debut in New York's Town Hall in 1929. These performances brought Manuel Ramírez's style of guitar and Hernandez's skill to the notice of other players. The guitar that Manuel Ramírez gave Segovia was later donated by Segovia's widow, Emilita, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it now resides. Both these innovations and many others are standard today. Ramírez went on to build more guitars for Segovia, which became his guitars of choice after having for the past 25 years used those made by Herman Hauser. In 1971 the sales shop was replaced by a larger shop at Concepción Jerónima 5, directly in front of the original establishment. In 1988 Jose III passed control of the business to José IV and Amalia, who had returned in the same year to help her brother. A subsequent major restructuring resulted in the closure of the Ventas workshop in 1992, a reduction in the number of employees and concentrating at the General Margallo workshop on wholly handmade professional instruments, which reduced to production rate of 130 a year. They also contracted out the construction of their top quality student instruments to other workshops, which were then delivered to Ramírez for final inspection and adjustment. José III died in 1995, his workshop having produced in his lifetime 20,000 hand built guitars, nearly 30 to 40 times that of most of the company's competitors.

Since José III had introduced it in the early 1960s, the company's top hand built model, the 1a or Primeria José IV, had been the rich slightly mellow sounding Tradicionel, which had the reputation of being an uncomfortable “guitar for giants”. To complement it José IV developed the Especial, a new brighter, lighter sounding, more comfortable guitar, which was introduced to the market in 1992. In the summer of 1995 Ramirez were unable to renew the lease on the original shop at Concepción Jerónima nº 2 and moved to Calle de la Paz nº8. José IV died of lung cancer in 2000, leaving Amalia to oversee the entire operation. as of 2010 this consists of a team of fourteen, including Amalia herself, four other guitar makers, and three apprentices. José IV's children José Enrique and Cristina have been involved in the family business since 2006 and 2007 respectively. Today the company offers, in addition to classical guitars, electro acoustic guitars, solid body electric guitars and flamenco instruments. A Ramírez hand built classical guitar is typically made of 14,836 items, of which 438 are essential pieces which make up the structure of the instrument, while the rest are the myriad of little pieces that go into the decoration.