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To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of great guitarist Ida Presti (1924-1967), Italian luthier Mario Grimaldi chose to build a series of guitars inspired by her 1963 Daniel Friederich guitar. The original Friederich guitar of Presti is currently owned by a good friend of Mario's, so he has been able to thoroughly inspect and measure out all details of the original. Although Mario does intend next year to build an near-exact bench copy of the original, the guitars in his series honoring Ida Presti are more "inspired by" this 1963 Friederich, rather than being an attempt at a literal copy, which is what we have here. For this guitar, Mario used a 40-year old spruce soundboard sourced from the Jura region, an Alpine area between Switzerland and France, which is the same area where Friederich and later Romanillos used to get their woods. The rosette is Mario's personal design, only in the central area is he quoting Friederich with the overlapping bean-shaped mosaics. The headstock is manually sculpted by Mario and again, referencing Friederich of course, but not literally in the shape, it's nuanced subtly to Mario's personal taste. Tuning machines are by Alessi. The sound of the guitar is actually quite Friederich-esque - it has a deep, cathedral-like resonance in the box with firm and sturdy fundamentals at the core of every note, giving the guitar a silky, rich and layered quality of tone without loss of clarity. Tone production is a breeze as the guitar is very responsive to the slightest touch - very challenging to produce a bad-sounding note on this guitar! Overall a very impressive guitar from this fascinating builder with such a varied and interesting background with experience and knowledge gained over many decades of dedicated work and research.
Photos of this guitar taken during construction
