José Ramírez was born in Madrid in 1858, the first child of a well-off landowning family. In 1870, at around twelve years old, he was apprenticed to the guitar maker Francisco González — a training ground he shared, notably, with his own younger brother, Manuel Ramírez, who would go on to build the instrument that launched Andrés Segovia's career.

By 1890, Ramírez had opened permanent premises in Madrid, at Calle de la Concepción Jerónima, where the family firm would continue to operate for well over a century. His work followed the design principles of Antonio Torres, the great nineteenth-century Spanish luthier, in nearly every respect but one: Ramírez built a larger flamenco instrument, known as the tablao guitar, developed at the request of flamenco players who wanted more volume and projection for performance in noisy tablaos and cafés.

He trained his own son, José Ramírez II, in the craft, establishing a workshop that would become the foundation of what guitar historians now call the Madrid School of guitar making — a lineage so influential that nearly every major Madrid luthier of the twentieth century, from Santos Hernández to Domingo Esteso, can trace their training back to José Ramírez or his brother Manuel.

José Ramírez II, born in 1885, apprenticed under his father as expected — but rather than settling into the family workshop, he left Spain in his early twenties to tour South America as a performing guitarist, a career that stretched into a twenty-year stay abroad, most of it in Argentina.

It was there that he met his wife, Blanca, and started a family; their son, the future José Ramírez III, was born in Buenos Aires in 1922. Word of his father's death in Madrid in 1923 brought José II back to Spain, and by 1925 he had taken over the family workshop, folding two decades of life as a touring musician into a second career as its custodian. He was, unusually for the dynasty, both a genuinely skilled luthier and an accomplished performer — a rare combination that shaped how closely he understood what players actually needed from an instrument. His stewardship of the workshop was recognized in 1936 with a gold medal at the Ibero-American Exhibition in Seville, not long before the Spanish Civil War would test the business, and the family, severely.

José Ramírez III grew up inside the family trade, apprenticing in the workshop his grandfather had founded and his father then ran. The Spanish Civil War and its long aftermath brought severe shortages of materials, forcing the young José to improvise and experiment out of necessity — an experience that left him, by his own account, with a lasting love of innovation that would define the rest of his career.

The path to leading the firm was not smooth. His brother Alfredo, who had handled the business's administration, died in 1954; their father followed three years later, in 1957, forcing José III to set guitar making itself aside for a time simply to keep the business running. Once he had stabilized it, he began reshaping nearly every aspect of Ramírez construction.

Cedar tops. José III was the first to build classical guitar soundboards from red cedar rather than the traditional spruce — a change in tonal character that would eventually become standard across the entire industry, prized for its warmer, more immediate voice.

A larger, more resonant body. He increased the size of the soundbox and added a cypress lining to the sides of the instrument, changes aimed squarely at giving performers more volume and projection in the larger concert halls that mid-century touring careers increasingly demanded.

Finish and formula experiments. He developed his own varnish formulation, one he claimed crystallized like traditional French polish shellac while offering the durability of lacquer — an attempt to resolve a long-standing trade-off between a finish's sound and its resilience on the road.

He kept experimenting until the very end of his career. In 1983, José III designed the "cámara" guitar, an attempt to eliminate the troublesome resonant dead spots known as wolf notes, and he collaborated with the French guitarist Marcel Dadi on a classical guitar with a cutaway body — a design still in production today. He trained more than a generation of journeymen luthiers who went on to open their own respected workshops, and, in 1988, he passed control of the business to the next generation: his children José IV and Amalia, both by then guitar makers in their own right.

José Ramírez IV, also known as José Enrique, largely built his father's "Tradicional" model in the early years of his career, but went on to design a new instrument of his own, the 1A Especial, and to develop construction techniques aimed at making Ramírez guitars more comfortable to play and more stable against the movements of the wood over time.

His most consequential decision may have been a democratic one. Where his father had shown little interest in instruments for beginners, José IV introduced dedicated student lines, the E and R series, extending the Ramírez name to players who could never have afforded — or needed — a fully handmade concert instrument.

The workshop received its most famous endorsement under his stewardship. In 1979, Andrés Segovia selected a guitar built specifically by José Enrique from among several instruments the workshop had sent him for consideration — a moment José IV found so moving that he wrote a personal dedication beside the label. Segovia went on to play that instrument, a cedar-topped guitar, for the remainder of his career.

His sister, Amalia Ramírez, joined the workshop at twenty-one under their father's direction and, after some years working elsewhere, returned to help José IV run the business — the two siblings splitting responsibilities, with José Enrique focused on construction and Amalia on the commercial side. She would go on to design the "Guitarra Conservatorio," an accessible route into professional-level instruments, later refined into the Simple Concert Model. When José Ramírez IV died in 2000, Amalia took over direction of the entire business — the first woman in the family's history to lead the workshop.

Today the workshop is run by Cristina and José Enrique Ramírez, José IV's children, guided by their aunt Amalia — the fourth and fifth generations of the family working side by side under one roof. Each oversees a different part of the business: José Enrique supervises construction and continues his own research into new models, Cristina manages the commercial side, and Amalia, now in her fifth decade in the trade, remains responsible for quality control, research, and the design of new instruments.

In the early 1990s, the family made a deliberate choice to return to their roots, moving to reduced premises on Calle Margallo and returning to a smaller, more limited scale of handmade production rather than pursuing volume. The shop later relocated again, to Calle de la Paz, close to its original nineteenth-century home. Every handcrafted Ramírez guitar today is still built to individual order — a working philosophy that has changed remarkably little since José Ramírez I first picked up a saw in the 1870s.

Some of the family's own customers now describe Ramírez guitars as sounding better than they ever have — a claim Amalia herself has been quick to pass along rather than take sole credit for, crediting it to five generations of accumulated refinement rather than any single maker's hand. The workshop's instruments have been heard in the hands of performers as varied as Segovia, Julian Bream, John Williams, Paco de Lucía, and — improbably, for a Madrid guitar shop — George Harrison and Eric Clapton.