I always try to put a little bit of my soul into a guitar.
This is a mixture of sweetness,
which I sometimes have, not always,
and a little bit of bravery.
The part that I love the most about working with wood
is touching it, the feeling of the wood in my hands.
It's something that always reminds me about who I am,
where are my roots, where I belong to.
The wood needs to be dried at least for 30 years,
which means that I'm using the materials
that my grandfather bought.
I’ve never met him; he died one month before I was born.
So I get to touch the things that he picked
without knowing they would be for me,
because I'm the first woman in the family to make guitars.
So it's quite special.
Once you have picked the material,
then you start to prepare all the parts of the guitar.
We always start with shaping of the neck.
The second part, it's the top.
When we decide the materials,
we decide which one of the templates that we have,
that we're gonna use.
The first thing that you do when you cut it
is to put it in the solera.
The solera is the mold that we use for the top and the back
to give the guitar this little curve so it sounds better.
And then for the top, we need to put the rosette in it.
And it's little pieces of wood,
and we make the drawing, the design,
and we have to start putting every single piece
so it matches.
The rosette, it's one of the most difficult parts to do.
But it's also one of the most creative ones,
where you are allowed to do whatever you want.
It takes me like two months and a half
to make a couple of guitars,
because we are always making a couple of them
so when one is gluing we can work with the other one.
Actually when a guitar is gluing
you're going to use this old form of clamp.
These ones we made ourselves here,
so we can put pressure on the guitar.
The flamenco and classical guitar they may look equal
but in the construction they are different.
Classical player, they always look
for a neat note, bright sound.
But the flamenco ones, they just want soul.
Everybody asks about the sides bending.
You have to put them under the water for a couple of hours
and then you do this bending with heat.
We use a little oven and if you get the wood wet,
through the process you can bend the sides
to the shape of the guitar.
The Conde business started with
an uncle of my grandfather in 1915.
Nowadays, in this workshop we are three people,
plus my father.
At first, continuing the tradition,
it was not something that I had in mind.
My father suggested me to come
to the workshop in the evenings, just to try.
And I found it beautiful to know
how the family business worked and how to make a guitar.
The first guitar that I closed, I remember going back home
and my smile couldn't be bigger.
Because it's the first moment
that you see a complete guitar.
For joining of the back, we need to put enough pressure
to stick the back and the sides,
but it's not so much so the sides could break.
The tradition is to give your first guitar to your mother,
but I'm not a boy, so I decided to give it to my father,
which was my master.
I was totally afraid that it would be a mistake
and a mess and it wouldn't sound.
But it did sound, and it did sound well,
and I couldn't be more proud.
I remember this as one of the most exciting days of my life.
Once you have stuck all the guitar together,
then you start with the fingerboard.
We always use ebony, from Africa.
It's a really tough material because
it has a lot of density, it's really heavy.
You have to be very careful in
the distribution of the frets.
If you are mistaken by just one millimeter
you wouldn't be able to tune it, it would be impossible.
After that you only have to give the last touches.
Once a guitar is finished, you have to adjust
the neck bone and the bridge bone.
And this is really important because
that will decide the tension of the strings.
Sometimes you need a whole day to adjust a guitar,
to find it perfect.
But I guess it will never be perfect
because it depends on the person who plays the guitar.
I have really good memories with flamenco music
and then for me it means home actually.
It comes from the heart of a person.
I have this romantic idea that this is my grain,
that I live in this world so someone else can make music,
which gives life to all of us.