2025 Jose Vigil CD/CSAR

This 2025 Jose Vigil classical guitar, with a quartersawn cedar top and CSA rosewood back and sides, was handmade in Granada, Spain, in the Realejo quarter next to Antonio Marín's workshop.

A Sound of His Own

Jose's guitars have a slightly more compact body with a very sturdy build. This one has great speed of response and big volume, with many nuances and colors of sound. It is also thick and lush, with a rich, creamy overtone content in every note – and at the same time a great amount of clarity and separation. Perhaps the sound is best described as having a "dark" quality, which gives it an alluring mystique. Jose has really created his own sound, and it is simply gorgeous.

First-Rate CSA Rosewood and a Santos-Style Rosette

Materials on this guitar are spectacular, featuring a first-rate set of CSA rosewood for the back and sides. Of course Jose chooses his materials primarily for their structural and sonic qualities, but in this case we cannot ignore just how beautiful the patterning and color of the grain are. He's matched it with a lovely quartersawn cedar top. Jose also has exquisite taste in decorative elements and inlay design – the meticulously made rosette has the "wave" pattern in the central mosaic that was also favored by the Manuel Ramírez workers, in particular Santos Hernández. A fantastic guitar in every way, built by one of today's top Spanish builders.

Jose Vigil: From Asturias to Granada

Jose Vigil was born in Asturias, in northern Spain, in 1979, into a family of musicians, and has played guitar since his teens. His love of woodworking – he had studied cabinet making for some time – combined with his musical background naturally led him to guitar construction. During a trip to Granada in 2007 he met a guitar teacher who owned a guitar by Antonio Marín Montero, and he realized he was in the best possible place to learn the traditional methods of guitar making. Read more about Jose.

The Granada Guitar-Making Community

Jose settled in Granada and was welcomed warmly into the guitar-making community, where he received training, advice and friendship from the veterans of the craft – Antonio Marín, Rafael Moreno Rodríguez, Henner Hagenlocher and John Ray, as well as Edmund and Florian Blöchinger during their regular visits to Granada. After three years in a first workshop in a small mountain village outside the city, he moved to the Realejo neighborhood of Granada, just a few meters from Antonio Marín's workshop, where he spent – and still spends – long hours watching the master at work.

The "Granada" School: From Torres to Bouchet–Marín

Being in the "Granada" school, Jose's guitars have a slightly more compact body size, with great speed of response and big volume, and many nuances and colors of sound. His guitars have evolved from a smaller Torres plantilla and bracing to a slightly larger Bouchet–Marín style with stiffer cross-grain reinforcement: lightweight and responsive, but also round and rich, and aesthetically understated. Building, for Jose, is slow, methodical work: he takes great care not to create unnecessary tensions during assembly, prepares perfect joints, controls humidity throughout the build and assembles with hot hide glue only. GSI is proud to be Jose's exclusive dealer in the USA.