Thane’s Auddie D’souza and Mira Road's Sunil Shinde have been painstakingly shaping panels of solid wood into slick, custom guitars for over two decades now. The luthiers tell us about their accidental yet poetic beginnings and all the time and care that go into producing the sound of music
While Sunil Shinde has been making guitars since the age of 15 in 1989, Auddie D'souza became a luthier in 1998 while he was in college. Photo Courtesy: Sunil Shinde/Auddie D'souza
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.