Page 25 - BiTS_06_JUNE_2024

SF: When I started playing guitar at 13, it was acoustic. When my father gave me my first guitar
it was an acoustic Epiphone guitar and I didn't even touch an electric guitar for probably at least
three years, maybe four years before I played electric. Yeah.

BiTS: Did you learn to play flamenco early on? I mean, clearly the stuff that you're doing is both

classical guitar and flamenco guitar.
SF: Yeah, I took flamenco lessons. I started them about, I don't know, 20 years ago or more, 24
years ago. My son was a baby. I got back home. I went back to Canada to have my son and

reconnect with my family after spending about a decade in Austin. When I got back home, I found
there was a flamenco guitar teacher in Ottawa of all places [chuckles] and a friend of mine was
studying with him, and I thought, well, I want to try that too. I just love Spanish guitar, so I thought
this would be cool and it really expanded my conception of guitar and opened my right hand,
especially as far as techniques. That's how I started to learn all those classical and flamenco
techniques which I've since been able to apply to my blues playing. So it's all really interesting
how it fits together, but it's definitely changed the way I play guitar and approach guitar.

BiTS: Tell me about the guitar itself. Handmade, I gather?

SF: The guitar itself is a handmade Flamenca Negra and it's made in Paracho, Mexico, by a builder
named Salvador Castillo. So Paracho, Mexico is in the mountains in Mexico in the Michoacán
province and it's a town that was founded by a Spanish luthier. So they make guitars, the
flamencos and the classicals down there in the Spanish method and it's a fantastic place to go to
get a handmade, custom handmade guitars. They have beautiful builders down there. They use
the old methods, and they build everything by hand. For the price, it's great [laughs] because I
don't have to go all the way to Spain to find one,
but it's just great, such a cool place.

BiTS: It's hard to see in the pictures that I've seen
of the guitar. Are there beautiful fingerboard
markings and that kind of thing?

SF: It’s pretty basic actually. It's not like a super
luxe guitar. It's just really well made, and it
sounds good. It's not super ornate or anything.

BiTS: Okay. What about the fingerboard size?
A guitar by Salvador
Very often people who switch from playing
Castillo
electric guitars with narrow necks have difficulty
with the fingerboard if it is wide. Have you got a wide one or a thin one?

SF: I think it's a standard one, so it's probably fairly wide and it's not custom size or anything,
so it's just the standard size. And yes, it is different to go from a Fender Telecaster, which I play,
to a nylon string. It's a different instrument.

BiTS: Yes.

SF: I mean, once you realise that it's a different instrument, then you don't have to think, oh, I'm
going to approach this thing the same way I do my Telecaster because you’re not. It sings
differently. It sits differently in your body.

BiTS: There’s a fabulous version that you do of ‘La Malaguena’. I wonder whether you've heard
the version that Snooks Eaglin did many years ago.