Michael Cadiz – 2021 64 cm

Description

Michael Cadiz is a Seattle, Washington, native, who moved his workshop to Graz, Austria, in 2016. He built his first guitar at the age of 15. He feels profoundly grateful for Robert Ruck, who invited him to stay for a while in his workshop to share his philosophy and approach to guitar building and from whom he learned a lot. Furthermore, he also received great support from the Seattle builders Rick Davis and Greg Oxrieder. In 2016, he moved his workshop to Graz, Austria, where he has successfully built guitars ever since.

Michael told us a few words about this beautiful guitar:

“My Modern Concert model is by most definitions these days. It is constructed using hide glue and a relatively conservative seven fan system and few cross struts. It is my attempt to reconcile the allure of late-nineteenth-century Spanish instruments with the higher tension, body, projection, and evenness that many modern guitarists are looking for. These guitars have a good dynamic range, variety of timbres, clarity, and balance. Like my other guitars, the voice is still quite traditional, though perhaps a bit more in the direction of the mid-twentieth-century. It is become more and more my aim to achieve a clear and even frequency response that can be heard well in hall without being encumbered by excessive mid frequencies. I like to maintain a low enough body resonance so that one feels the traditional bloom and support in the basses, but a slightly stiffer overall construction to bring a bit more evenness and headroom to the instrument overall.”

This guitar is simply beautiful. It displays a new variation of Michael’s signature rosette, with thinly worked marquetry in a light-colored spectrum. Moreover, the Indian rosewood used for the back and sides stands out for its intense orange and red veins. With this instrument, Michael Cadiz achieves impressive timbres and a striking immediacy in tone production, making it an excellent traditional classical guitar. Additionally, the playability is superb, both due to the slightly shorter scale length of 64 cm and thanks to the raised fingerboard and perfect setup.