Ramírez Guitars
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| Private | |
| Industry | Musical instruments |
| Founded | 1882 in Madrid, Spain |
| Founder | José Ramírez |
| Headquarters | Spain |
| Products | Classical guitars |
| Website | guitarrasramirez.com |
Ramírez Guitars (Guitarras Ramírez in Spanish) is a Spanish manufacturer of professional, concert-quality classical and flamenco guitars.
Five generations of the Ramírez family have produced Ramirez Guitars. The company was founded in 1882, when José Ramírez opened a workshop at 2 Concepción Jerónima, Madrid.
Following José Ramírez's death in 1923, his son José Ramírez II, who was married with two children, José III and Alfredo, returned from South America where he had been working as a guitarist. He was also a guitar maker, and by 1925 José II was running the business.
Considerably hindered by material shortages during the Spanish Civil War, José II and his son José III, by now himself a guitar maker, began experimenting with non-traditional woods and design techniques. José II's other son Alfredo managed the business.
Alfredo died in 1954, and José II in 1957, forcing José III to take over the management of the shop and for a time abandon guitar-making himself. However, he continued to experiment, putting designs on paper to be built by journeymen, and supervising every phase of construction of the instruments. He worked closely with top performers, which brought acceptance to his innovations.
He built concert guitars for Andrés Segovia which were larger and more powerful than those of Torres. These guitars featured a longer scale length, and asymmetrical bracing unlike the symmetrical Torres pattern. Both these innovations and many others are standard today.
More radical still, in 1963 he built a ten-string guitar for Narciso Yepes, to accommodate Yepes' unique chromatically balanced tuning, and later an eight-string guitar for José Tomás. High-end professional models based on both of these extended-range guitars remain in the company's current catalog.
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Wikipedia