2016 Jake Fuller "Purnell" SP/HR

Jake Fuller built this "Purnell" classical guitar in 2016 with a quarter-sawn spruce top and a four-piece back of Honduran rosewood.

In the videos above, Federico Nuñez plays Abel Fleury's "Estilo Pampeano" and Peter Fletcher plays the Prelude from Bach's Lute Suite No. 3 on this guitar.

A Four-Piece Honduran Rosewood Back

The first thing you notice is its striking look – above all the four-piece back of Honduran rosewood (the favorite wood of Miguel Rodríguez Jr. of the Rodríguez workshop), with its dark-chocolate color and swirling grain, framed in light maple purfling and paired with a beautiful quarter-sawn spruce top.

Sound and Playability

Workmanship is clean, simple and refined. The tone is textured and balanced, with plenty of overtones and real clarity – Spanish and Northern European at once. A very light body gives it the response of an early 20th-century Spanish guitar, and the slightly weightier neck adds sustain. The neck is easy and comfortable.

Jake Fuller "Purnell": An English Guitar Maker from Suffolk

Jake Fuller is an English classical guitar maker who has built guitars since the late 1990s, in a workshop first in Laxfield and then in Reydon, Suffolk. Woodworking runs in his family: his Cornish grandfather, Purnell, was a wheelwright who made carts, wheelbarrows, gates and furniture, and who lost a leg in World War I (he even built his own wooden leg); some of his tools, and a table that serves as Jake's workbench, are still in the workshop. Jake never met him, and he builds under the name "Purnell" – also his own middle name – as a tribute. His father, a toy maker in Suffolk, gave him his first apprenticeship.

Training with David Rouse, and the Spanish Tradition

A guitarist himself, Jake began classical guitar studies at 16 and went on to earn a BSc in Musical Instrument Technology at London Guildhall University, where he studied with David Rouse and David Whiteman. His main influences are Antonio de Torres and Hermann Hauser, with ideas from Santos Hernández and Masaru Kohno: traditional, lightly built Spanish guitars with a few refinements of his own, often made from woods with a story – reclaimed timber, old pianos, gifts from fellow makers.