Strings attached: Why wood is like wine for Mumbai's trusty custom guitar makers

For Auddie D'souza, making a customised guitar is like having an intense love affair. The process demands his complete commitment if not undivided attention. While you would imagine him having many such affairs annually, D'Souza ends up making only eight guitars per year on average. A stickler for quality, he is blunt about the time required. "If a guy comes now and tells me he wants to gift his girlfriend a guitar for Valentine's Day, I cannot make it in that timeline because I cannot commit," he says plainly.

"Every piece of wood is a new piece of wood," says the Thane-based luthier who is as tuned in to the various moods of his raw material as a carpenter. "The wood has different qualities and always gives surprises. Sometimes, it won't bend how you want it and will bend slowly. It may think of twisting right now and then we have to straighten it out. It is like how every student is different," adds the luthier, whose affair with wood started rather organically, if not accidentally.

As a child, he would help his father create and mend things around the house. Just after finishing his junior college in 1998, D'souza had decided to try his hand at making a guitar, after borrowing an electric guitar from a friend. "I had an acoustic guitar but couldn't afford to buy an electric guitar because finances were tough. Since I had some woodworking experience working with my dad in the house, I said why not make one?"

D'souza not only made the guitar for himself but also started repairing and mending guitars for his friends. "I made two guitars in my PG room while I was studying in Aurangabad and even repaired guitars there," D'souza says proudly. Back then, there weren't too many shops that sold guitar parts, so he had to make his own. "I used to have a Yellow Pages book, where I had marked all the guitar shops in the city that would have parts and I used to search for them and they would wonder why I am asking for them," reminisces D'souza, whose guitar-making shop is called Cipriano Music.

While he did work as an engineer for six years, D'souza quit his job to follow guitar-making full time since 2006 and has made approximately 60 to 65 custom-made guitars. Even the possibility of investment from interested parties couldn't coax him to increase production and make more guitars. Right now, his electric guitars start at Rs 85,000 and acoustic guitars at Rs 1.35 lakh each and D'souza is now one of only three guitar makers popularly-known in the city's music circuit.

He has a complaint, though. "Having a guitar has become more of a fashion statement. People don't know the nitty-gritty of guitars and they just want it because it is popular," feels D'Souza, adding that this is why most people opt for poor quality guitars, usually made from plywood which doesn't last too long. "An actual instrument is something which is not particularly expensive but has good wood and it can be passed on like an heirloom," says D'Souza, who is currently slicing planks of thick, solid wood that came to his workshop seven to eight years ago. These planks "get better with time, just like wine," he says. "The older the guitar, the better is the sound because the wood has seasoned and settled as an instrument."

When he is not making guitars, D'Souza is spending his time at the lumberyards, timber markets and saw mills in the city and the country. "I get my wood from Odisha, Calcutta and Pondicherry because rosewood, ebony and mahogany are grown here. Teak wood isn't used because it is not standard and possesses an oily nature, which does not ring." However, the Thane-based engineer-turned-luthier explains that the sources of wood are depleting due to excess demand for other purposes, and that is why he is able to access only certified wood and that has made it expensive over time.

While D'souza has been busy making guitars since 1998, Mira Road-based Sunil Shinde has been around for a decade longer. "I started making guitars just after my SSC exams at the age of 15," says Shinde, rewinding back to the year 1989. "I wanted to do some work side-by-side and so I got to know about this 6x10 sq ft shop in Malad run by a person called Salvador Dias. He repaired and sold Indian guitars and I thought it would be interesting to learn it. I told my brother about it and then we spoke to Dias and I got the job."

His enthusiastic and varied ideas surprised the owner on the first day itself, recalls Shinde. At the time, Peter Pereira, another guitar-maker from Thane, was the only known name in the business apart from another person in Parel who was part of a tiny shop in Malad. The demand for custom-guitars has only risen over the years, says Shinde, who makes only 7 to 10 custom-made guitars every year and devotes the chunk of his time to servicing guitars, a steadier source of income. While D'souza did manage to get business from the likes of Orkut and Facebook in the early days before the boom, Shinde credits his busy-ness to word of mouth, even though he has been on social media since 2009. Among Shinde's clients are Ehsaan Noorani, Loy Mendonca and Shankar Mahadevan's son Siddharth Mahadevan, apart from musician Ravi Iyer, who, Shinde tells us, is still using the guitar that he had custom-built in 2012.

Luckily for both, the pandemic hasn't really affected their guitar-making process. They have been able to continue their work in the quiet of their homes, like they have been doing for the last few decades, while making sure the music from the instruments they make rings in streets not only in the city but also around the world.

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