Dunn Guitars

Michael Dunn Biography

In 1966 Michael began a three year apprenticeship in guitar making under maestros Jose Orti and Jose Ferrer, at George Bowden's workshop in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Both Orti and Ferrer were members of families with a long-standing history in instrument making. They taught him the traditional Spanish artisan's methods of classical and flamenco guitar construction. To this day, Michael considers himself enormously fortunate that they instilled in him an awareness of being part of a long, continuous history of guitar making. They taught him that despite the solitary nature of the profession, it's practitioners do not operate in a vacuum, producing ever unique and newly designed instruments. A solid grounding in the Spanish tradition of construction and aesthetics has allowed him the freedom, later in life, to experiment with artistic expression and sound projection, while respecting the craft's tried-and-true tenets of proportion, balance and function.

As a guitarist fascinated by the acoustic jazz of Django Reinhardt's "Hot Club de France" quintet, Michael developed an interest in the Maccaferri guitar and the technology of the interior soundbox-reflector. His aim is to maximize the sound-projection abilities of the instrument, while preserving it's authentic "Django" tone. He constructs his guitars to be balanced and responsive. The personal touch and technique of the player determine the sound of the instrument, because a good guitar responds in different ways in the hands of different players.

In our era, the term "hand-made" is applied, as often as not, to guitars produced by a sizable workforce assembling identical parts made by computer-controlled machinery.
Michael tunes an individual soundboard and select all it's adjacent components to match that tuning. Hence, no two instruments are exactly alike. Maximum output from any given set of parts, personally selected, assembled and tuned is what he strives for, not standardization.