2018 Jake Fuller "Purnell" SP/MP

A 2018 "Purnell" classical guitar by Jake Fuller, with a spruce top and maple back and sides – Jake's 100th guitar, and the first with his new back design.

Jake's 100th Guitar

This lovely guitar has walnut for the bridge, bindings and head veneer – no rosewood at all – with charming inlay work in the headstock and a walnut back strip.

A New Back Design, in Jake's Words

"The guitar has a new design for the back, using a raised central strut housed into four highly tapered transverse bars. It's lightweight and rigid longitudinally, giving extra structural stability to the guitar as a whole. The back now moves more uniformly and the air resonance has dropped down a tone. Subsequently the guitar has an enhanced bass response but retains definition, and the trebles are nice and open. Combined with a slightly stiffer soundboard than previous guitars, (achieved by heightening the transverse bars in the soundboard's lower bout)."

Sound and Playability

The sound is textured, with ample overtones and excellent clarity – a synthesis of Spanish and Northern European styles – and the neck is very comfortable. A beautiful-looking and beautiful-sounding guitar by any measure.

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.