I visited Peter Tsiorba during a recent trip to Portland, Oregon for several reasons. He has been an active contributor to the Old School Flamenco Foro and there is value in establishing personal relationships with people who support common interests. I had never played a Peter Tsiorba guitar and I wanted to learn more about them. My 1977 Ramírez flamenco had a bad crack in the top and I was hoping Peter would be willing to fix it.

Some of you may have wondered how to pronounce Peter's surname. Thousands of English words end in the letters "ts," such as acts, ants, arts, bats, dots, etc. English speakers have no difficulty pronouncing those works, but "ts" is not used at the beginnings of English words and English speakers tend to have trouble making the same "ts" sound at the beginning of a word. Start "Tsiorba" as you would end "dots" and the result will be similar to "Zorba" which most English speakers have no difficulty pronouncing and which is close to the correct pronunciation of Peter's name.

This post is about Peter rather than me, but I am going explain something about my background to provide basis for later comments about Peter's guitars. I had the good fortune to spend more than 20 years traveling the world almost constantly. Some of my favorite things to do in spare time where possible was to listen to live flamenco and to visit guitar shops and luthiers and try guitars. The travel and guitar shop visits started earlier, but luthier visits began in 1973 when Paco de Lucia introduced me to Manuel Contreras. Paco wanted a guitar to use in concert halls that would be louder than traditional flamenco guitars. Contreras had especially designed and constructed two experimental negra models for Paco to try. They were both made from the same woods and were constructed at the same time according to the same experimental design plans. Even so, no two guitars sound exactly the same due to minor differences. Paco had borrowed both guitars for a couple weeks and couldn't decide which he liked best. He said I could have either one I wanted and that he would take the other, because he couldn't decide and couldn't justify owning both.

I still have that guitar, but more important than the guitar was the chance to meet Manuel Contreras and spend several hours in his workshop. He had worked for José Ramírez until 1962 when he left to start his own guitar-making business. He said José Ramírez was focused on trying to achieve a high degree of uniformity from guitar to guitar so customers could know what to expect when they ordered one, but Manuel Contreras was an imaginative designer. He wanted to be free to experiment with new designs rather than to make one guitar after another exactly the same and that was why he had left Ramírez to start his own business.

He was on good terms with José Ramírez even though he had left and he arranged for me to visit the Ramírez shop where I met other makers who eventually left to start their own guitar-making businesses. The point of all this is that I have heard and played many guitars made by well-known makers and I know what a good flamenco guitar should be like.

Like most luthiers who make fine guitars, Peter Tsiorba generally custom makes guitars to order and didn't have a finished guitar for me to play when I arrived. However, he had a blanca flamenco that was nearly finished. French polish still needed to be applied and he warned that the guitar hadn't been set up to his standards yet and that various adjustments had only been "roughed-in." A nut hadn't been properly fitted, but he used a temporary nut and put some strings on so I was able to play using a cejilla.

I hadn't gone there with the intention of buying a guitar (I already have three), but by the second rasgueado I wanted a Peter Tsiorba guitar! I haven't heard or played many guitars over the 32 years since I took delivery of my Ramírez that I have liked as well, but Peter Tsiorba's standard flamenco guitar is better! I told him immediately that I wanted one.



Peter's guitar not only sounds good, the workmanship is flawless and it was wonderfully easy to play even though all the setup adjustments hadn't been made. A lot of things have to be right in addition to sound quality to have a great guitar. Unlike most luthiers, Peter plays traditional flamenco very well. He knows what a flamenco guitar should sound like. He knows how a flamenco guitar should be set up. He knows what it should feel like in the hands of a player. He is a perfectionist and he gets everything right. Even though that guitar hadn't been fully set up, I know that is true because of improvements he made to my Ramirez that I will describe further below.

Not only are his guitars outstanding, they are grossly under-priced (if you want one maybe you should order before he reads this!). You would conclude his standard flamenco guitar is worth twice his current $2700 price if you were to ignore labels and directly compare the sound, playability and workmanship with guitars costing twice as much. Should beginners buy substantially-inferior student guitars when they can have one of the finest guitars available at any price for $2700? Peter's standard flamenco guitar is $2700 only because he is not as well known yet as some of the other makers. That will change. You can be sure his price will increase as it does. In my opinion, anyone who buys at the current price not only will have a terrific guitar to play, they will have made a good financial investment if they should decide to sell sometime in the future. And, no, he didn't ask me to write any of this. This post is entirely my own idea. I am just telling you my honest impression of his guitar.

Of course, $2700 is his current base price for a traditional peg-head flamenco (exactly what I want and will have as soon as he has it ready for me). However, buying a custom-made guitar directly from a maker provides the opportunity to get exactly what you want if you want something special. Depending on what that is, the price obviously might be higher. However, some changes like a shorter neck length if you have a short finger span probably wouldn't cost more. I don't know that for sure, you would have to ask him, but Peter seems very flexible and willing to please.



As I already mentioned, a bad crack developed in my cedar-top Ramírez flamenco about three years go. I hadn't had it fixed because it didn't adversely affect the sound and I haven't known anyone in this area that I would trust to fix it. Over the past couple years I also managed to badly ding the top numerous times with golpes outside the golpeador while playing rumbas a little too wildly.

I showed the crack, fingernail damage, and some fret wear to Peter and asked if he would be willing to fix the crack. He said he would have been able to repair it while I waited if it had happened recently, but that because it wasn't fresh and the center area of the guitar top had started to bow up slightly he wanted to carefully clean the inner surfaces of the crack and apply some humidity so the top could be warped back to close the gap. He said that would take a couple days, so I left the guitar with him and we went to the Oregon Coast for a couple days. He said he would be able to make the fingernail damage almost invisible (which surprised me, because I thought it was bad enough that the only fix would be top replacement) if he had more time, but that in two days he probably would be able to only fix the crack.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I returned two days later. The crack was gone, the finger nail dings were gone, and the frets had been filed down and polished to eliminate groves caused by 32 years of string wear and also to make them all perfectly flat and true to each other. I hadn't realized it before Peter explained, but the frets had never been filed perfectly true. The neck hadn't warped. The guitar fretboard was flat, but the upper frets were a little higher above the fretboard than the lower ones. I had raised the bridge to reduce string buzz on the upper frets, but the real problem had been fret top alignment and not bridge height. Peter explained that it usually is necessary to file frets down to make them perfectly level and true when a guitar is made, but that typically takes hours of hard work and makers sometimes decide the alignment is close enough and skip that process. That obviously had happened when my guitar was made, because the fret tops had not been filed.

I had been primarily concerned about the crack when I went to see Peter. The fret wear wasn't very bad and I had pointed it out to Peter mostly as an afterthought. Knowing what I know now, truing-up the frets made a much bigger improvement to the guitar overall than fixing the crack. Not that the crack repair wasn't important, because the top probably would have continued to warp if the crack hadn't been fixed. However, Peter is a perfectionist when it comes to set-up and fret work. I thought the guitar had been easy to play before, but what a difference Peter made to playability over that couple days! With the frets all perfectly true and level it was possible to lower the bridge back to the height it should have and you would have had to have played the guitar before and after to appreciate the full extent of the improvement. So, not only am I now looking forward to owning a new Peter Tsiorba blanca, my old cedar-top Ramírez looks practically new and the playability is better than when I picked it up from the Ramírez shop 32 years ago.



Leaving my guitar with Peter a couple days provided the added advantage of being able to visit him a second time and to get to know him better.



We picked and ate fresh figs from fig trees in his back yard, downed a couple pints at a local pub, talked about guitar-making, flamenco, and a range of other things over a couple multi-hour sessions. There isn't much, if anything, to not like about Peter. He is a very pleasant and knowledgeable guy who is passionate about flamenco guitar making. He makes outstanding classical guitars and sometimes also makes other instruments, but his real passion is flamenco guitar making and he is very good at it.

More photos of Peter Tsiorba's guitars and workshop can be seen at his website http://www.tsiorba.com.

-Bob

Well, I emailed my request to Peter this morning for a quote on a maple and spruce peghead flamenco with ebony binding, etc. I have long wanted a Maple peghead, but never impressed with any as much as Peter's maples. I may have to sell the Dominguez to pay for it, but life is too short to deny myself something special like this. I have never played on a Tsiorba, but Bob's review of playability convinced me to get my order in. I am looking forward to meeting Peter some day soon.

I should add a clarification to this statement I made further above:

Peter's guitar not only sounds good, the workmanship is flawless ...

Peter is a perfectionist who is capable of making hand-carved wood as smooth and polished as any piece of shiny plastic might be from a factory. However, he hand-makes guitars and thinks they should look like hand-made guitars rather than machine-produced products. He explained that he sometimes purposely puts small tool marks back into a smoothly-sanded head, because perfectly smooth wood doesn't look like hand-crafted product to him. Whether small tool marks like that are flaws or artistic elements is a matter of perspective. I am sure that if someone wants all parts of a guitar sanded perfectly smooth to look as though the guitar had been mass-produced in a factory, Peter would be willing to do that, but I personally prefer guitars the way Peter normally makes them.

-Bob

Flamenco guitars that were actually made in the Contreras shop personally by Manuel G. Contreras are rare. Are you sure that yours was?

Mendoza

Peter's guitars are amazing. I own a blanca he made that is truly wonderful. I have never played a guitar quite like it. The feel and the sound makes it a dream to play. I find it almost impossible to put down, he truly has a gift for building guitars. If I ever buy another guitar it will most certainly be another one of his.

Here is one of the best sounding flamenco IMO of all the flamenco clips Peter has on utube. Listen to the response and bass growl.

Nicholas wrote:Peter's guitars are amazing. I own a blanca he made that is truly wonderful. I have never played a guitar quite like it. The feel and the sound makes it a dream to play. I find it almost impossible to put down, he truly has a gift for building guitars. If I ever buy another guitar it will most certainly be another one of his.

How long did you have to wait for it?

Manos Lentas wrote:Bob's review of playability convinced me to get my order in.

No guitar will sound very good unless a player is able to play it well. Even the best players sound better playing guitars that are easy to play. They get more enjoyment from playing guitars that are easy to play and tend to play them more which leads to better playing abilities over time. I have found it difficult to put my guitar down since Peter worked his magic on it. He substantially improved what was already a good guitar and my playing is better because than it ever has been of improvements he made.

-Bob

My guitar was actually one Peter had completed already. For quite some time I was debating on purchasing one of his guitars. My instructor had been pushing me for quite some time to get a higher quality guitar. He plays a guitar Peter made last year that is amazing, after messing around with his guitar I knew I would be getting one similar to his. It just kind of happend that when I was ready to to commit and make my order, Peter had one completed that he had not sold. So I ended up going to his home soon after that to check the guitar out. The guitar was exactly what I was looking in sound and feel. Peter did some minor changes to the action and finish and I took it home a few days after I first played it.

I am so pleased to see this discussion about a guitarrero.
My students often ask me for advice about buying a flamenco guitar and often they tell me the names of very famous Spanish flamenco guitarreros which they have heard or found on internet.
I tell them that yes certainly they could buy such a guitar but I very strongly recommend them to see the guitars of the guitarreros alive these days and maybe not yet so famous.
I believe that it no longer is important if you are Spanish or for another country to make a good flamenco.
I have never had the pleasure of playing one of this Peter Tsiorba but I am sure that I will one day.

Saludos cordiales
Tomás