Antonio Sanchez

The Spanish guitar market has a gap in the middle of it. At one end are the student instruments — affordable, serviceable, and usually built a long way from Spain. At the other are the master guitars, made one at a time by a named luthier, priced accordingly. Between those two lies the territory where most serious guitarists actually spend their lives: too experienced for a beginner’s instrument, not yet ready to spend the price of a car. Antonio Sanchez built a workshop specifically to occupy that ground, and he did it by numbering his models so a player could see exactly where they stood on the ladder.

Learning the Trade Elsewhere

Antonio Sanchez did not begin by hanging out his own sign. He spent years working in other Spanish guitar workshops and factories first, accumulating the kind of knowledge that only comes from building at volume alongside people who have done it for decades.

That is a recognisably Valencian career path, and it is worth understanding why. The province has been the manufacturing heart of the Spanish guitar for well over a century — not the home of the celebrated individual masters, who are mostly associated with Granada and Madrid, but the place where the instruments that taught the world to play were actually made. A young craftsman in Valencia had access to something rare: a genuine trade, with real workshops, real production standards, and real progression.

Sanchez used it. By the time he founded his own company in 1984 under the name Concert S.A., he was not an enthusiast starting out. He was a trained luthier with a considered view of what the market was missing.

The Workshop at Paterna

The workshop sits in Paterna, on the edge of the city of Valencia — the same light-industrial belt that houses several of the region’s serious guitar houses. Around twenty craftsmen work there, building with traditional Spanish construction methods.

The production capacity runs to as much as ten thousand instruments a year, which sounds like a factory figure until you consider how it is distributed. This is not ten thousand identical guitars. It is a graded range running from student models through to concert instruments, with the upper tiers personally supervised or built by Antonio Sanchez himself. The volume at the bottom of the range is what makes the workshop viable; the instruments at the top are what it is actually known for.

Everything is made in Spain. The company holds OEC certification specifically verifying the Spanish origin of its instruments — nothing outsourced, nothing assembled from parts made elsewhere and finished locally.

That certification matters more than it might appear. “Spanish guitar” has become a diluted phrase: a great many instruments carrying Spanish names are designed in Spain and built somewhere considerably cheaper. Independent verification removes the ambiguity entirely, and a workshop willing to submit to it is making a statement about where it stands.

Recognition followed the standard. The company received an export award in 1989, within five years of founding, and craftsmanship awards in 1990 and 1996.

The 1000 Series

The clearest thing about the Antonio Sanchez catalogue is its numbering. The 1000 series — the 1008, 1015, 1020, 1025 and 1030 among others — ascends in materials and refinement as the number rises, and the progression is legible to anyone comparing two instruments.

At the lower end, the 1008 pairs a solid spruce top with mahogany back and sides, a mahogany neck and an Indian rosewood fingerboard — a genuinely solid-topped Spanish-built guitar at a price that has made it a long-standing recommendation for players moving up from a first instrument.

Further up, the 1025 keeps the solid spruce top but moves to Indian rosewood back and sides with an ebony fingerboard, at the Spanish standard of 650 mm scale and 52 mm nut across nineteen frets. The description that recurs is telling: an instrument that prioritises the resonance of the wood over ornamentation, producing a refined and understated sound rather than a showy one.

The catalogue extends well beyond the classical core. Flamenco models, cutaways, and the EG series of electro-classical instruments with onboard electronics for players working amplified — all built to the same 650 mm scale and 52 mm nut that define the Spanish standard.

What They Sound Like

Players describe these guitars consistently: clear articulation, a bright and responsive spruce-topped voice, basses that stay defined rather than spreading into mud, and trebles that answer to small changes in touch. Sustain is moderate rather than enormous, and chords blend cleanly — which is exactly the behaviour a classical player wants for contrapuntal writing, where excessive sustain turns clarity into wash.

The other quality noted repeatedly is value. The consensus that has followed the brand for decades is that these are well-built instruments providing a great deal of sound for the money — not a compromise, but an honest instrument at an honest price.

Where They Sit

Antonio Sanchez guitars are distributed through classical guitar specialists across Europe, the United Kingdom and North America, and have been since the late 1980s. They are usually described as a strong mid-market option among Spanish-built classical guitars, which is accurate but undersells what the phrase means in practice.

The mid-market in Spanish guitars is where the real decisions get made. It is the territory of the conservatoire student who needs something that will not embarrass them at an exam, the teacher buying instruments that will survive a decade of lessons, and the amateur who has played long enough to hear the difference and wants an instrument that rewards it. Serving that constituency properly requires consistency rather than brilliance — every guitar right, not one guitar exceptional.

The Essentials

1. Founded in 1984 by the luthier Antonio Sanchez, who trained through years of work in other Spanish guitar workshops and factories before starting his own company, Concert S.A.
2. Based in Paterna, in the Valencia region, with a team of around twenty craftsmen working by traditional Spanish methods
3. Capacity of up to ten thousand instruments a year across a graded range, with the upper models personally supervised or built by Sanchez
4. Holds OEC certification independently verifying that the instruments are made entirely in Spain
5. Awarded for export in 1989 and for craftsmanship in 1990 and 1996
6. Builds classical, flamenco, cutaway and electro-classical guitars, all at the Spanish standard 650 mm scale and 52 mm nut
7. The 1000 series ascends legibly in materials, from solid spruce over mahogany up to solid spruce over Indian rosewood with ebony boards
8. Distributed through classical guitar specialists across Europe, the UK and North America

There is a reason the same Valencian formula keeps producing workshops worth taking seriously. The province has the timber trade, the climate for seasoning, and a century of accumulated skill sitting in the hands of people who learned it from their predecessors. What a founder like Antonio Sanchez adds is a decision about who the guitars are for. He chose the players in the middle — the ones who have committed to the instrument but not yet to a master guitar — and built a workshop to serve them properly rather than adequately. Four decades on, that is still what the name means.

A history of Antonio Sanchez and the Paterna workshop building Spanish classical and flamenco guitars since 1984