2022 Jake Fuller "Purnell" SP/HR

A 2022 "Purnell" classical guitar by Jake Fuller, with a quarter-sawn spruce top and a two-piece Honduran rosewood back with a spruce "doble tapa" inside.

In the videos above, Nemanja Bogunovic plays his "Hagia Sophia" and Jâca (Jaxon Williams, guitar, with Wesley Ferreira, clarinet) play "Barbara Allen" from Robert Beaser's "Mountain Songs" on this guitar.

Dark-Chocolate Honduran Rosewood

Jake chose a gorgeous two-piece back of Honduran rosewood – the favorite wood of Miguel Rodríguez Jr. – with its dark-chocolate color and swirling grain. Inside, it has the Contreras-style "doble tapa": spruce laminated to the rosewood, making up standard thickness while increasing stability. Walnut is used for the bridge and head veneer, holly for the trim.

Sound and Playability

With full-depth linings instead of an end block, a laminated fingerboard, carbon neck reinforcement and a raised back bar, the guitar is stiff yet light, responding like an early 20th-century Spanish guitar, with a dark, mysterious presence in all registers and a lovely bottom end. Textured and clear in tone, and very easy to play.

Photos of this guitar being built

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.