2023 Youri Soroka "1924 Santos, ex Segovia" SP/IN

As we have been mentioning for several years now, Youri has fallen under the spell of Torres after having seen his first authentic Torres during a trip to Paris in 2019 where he attended (and exhibited at) the "Salon de la Belle Guitare" show. He has since built several great instruments for us based on Torres designs, and we were delighted to find out recently that Youri has shifted his attention to a very early admirer of Torres - Santos Hernandez. Youri found a specific guitar in the fantastic Orfeo publication "Santos Hernandez 1874-1943: Maestro Guitarrero" that really caught his attention - it was Santos built in 1924 that had been owned and played by Andres Segovia. Granada luthier John Ray contributed the detailed plans and analysis of the guitar on pages 154-157 and this inspired Youri to make a structural copy as an hommage to the great Santos. Aesthetically, Youri did his own thing, only really borrowing elements from the rosette and slightly from the headstock, otherwise all other treatments - bindings, purflings, tie-block, etc. are of his own but very much in the "spirit" of Santos.

Like a great Santos, this guitar has an ultra lightweight build which gives the guitar an immediate sound when the string is ever so slightly moved, with a huge, rich bottom end and thick, creamy trebles. The guitar has noticeably great power as well - this could easily fill any concert hall. While en route to GSI from France it did experience a small cracked area on one of the sides that was easily repaired beautifully by GV Rubio here in Los Angeles. It's visually un-noticeable and has zero impact on the sound or structural integrity of the guitar. Overall this is a great tribute to one of the legends of the old-world Spanish guitar era. Another fantastic guitar from Youri Soroka!

Photos taken during construction.

We met French-Ukrainian guitar builder Youri Soroka at the 2nd International "Antonio Marin Montero" Guitar Building Competition in Granada, Spain in 2018 and were immediately impressed with both the person and his work, and indeed ordered our first guitar from him at that time. He returned to Granada again in 2019 where he took second prize in the same competition. Youri’s backstory is almost as beautiful as the look and sound of his instruments. Here he describes how he went from a career in technology to falling in love with the craft of guitar building: "I was a computer software developer and came to guitar making by accident. Initially, I just wanted to repair my old classical guitar which led me to retable it. Impressed by the resulting sound and having then bought a few tools, I wanted to build one entirely from scratch. I completed my first guitar in less than a month working at night in my garage. Then the second, then third… I was starting to fall in love with the process. At some point, I realized that this was really something I wanted to do for a living as this was the first time in my life – when at work – I was saddened by the fact that it was 6 p.m. and time to go home. I always admired traditional and historical woodworking, and starting from my third build, I tried using hide glue and traditional methods for overall construction. Since then, I’ve stuck with these methods. Another thing important to me is building guitars in a planet friendly way with the least waste generated possible and no chemicals used – no gluing bindings with scotch, etc. The main ingredients are wood, hide glue and shellac. This also led to my interest in using local woods."