Santiago Canals & Cecilia Sáenz

Santiago de Cecilia

Luthier

©Ariadna Creus

©Roman

Building for sound

Cecilia and Santiago have been making guitars for more than 20 years
Both of them are also musicians
They craft to achieve beautiful sound

Santiago Canals and Cecilia Sáenz finished their training as luthiers in Barcelona in the workshops of Raúl Yagüe Diez and the master Juan Antonio Reyes Torres. Santiago had previously trained in the workshop of luthier Rios in Mar del Plata, Argentina, where he made his first three guitars. Since 2003 Cecilia and Santiago run the workshop Santiago de Cecilia, located in Poble Espanyol in Barcelona, where they are dedicated to building classical and flamenco concert guitars. "Our work is a way of life. The guitar is present and forms part of us, of our family. Working in the workshop is as precious to us as listening to music, as passionately studying something that interests us. For us, it means learning constantly because with each guitar we manage to decipher some of our doubts and, in this way, we learn and evolve," says Santiago.

Interview

©Ariadna Creus

Where does your passion for making guitars come from?: Cecilia: It comes from the passion for working with wood and creating sound. When I was young, I met a luthier from whom I ordered my cello and I had the opportunity to accompany and fall in love with the construction process.
How did you go from playing guitar to making them?: Santiago: When my guitar teacher told me to make a bone to rectify the string action of my guitar, I saw how interesting it was to manipulate it and I observed the variations I could make by modifying the string height. That is how I started.
Is Barcelona a good city for a guitar maker?: Cecilia: Barcelona has a great influence in the guitar world. Here lived the best guitarists and composers in Europe, and there is an incredible amount of historical instruments that we are able to encounter and study for our projects.
Do you remember the first guitar you made?: Santiago: The first guitar I built was under the supervision of Rios, my first lutherie teacher who knew how to teach me and transmit to me his passion for the guitar, the wood and efficient tools. Then I made three more guitars with him, in parallel to my academic studies.

Santiago Canals & Cecilia Sáenz are master artisans: they began their career in 2002 and they started teaching in 2005