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.