Sneak Peek: Manuel Delgado Podcast

Manuel Delgado: Our tagline for Delgado guitars is does your guitar have a story? And that's because I believe everybody has a story that's worth telling. And so when we sit with them, I want to know about what their life is, who are the people that are in their lives that matter to them. The question I love to ask people is, "When you're playing, where are you? " And I don't mean like physically like, “Oh, I'm sitting in a studio,”—no, art transforms, or transcends—it takes you somewhere where you're not necessarily where you physically are. If it's great art, and if it's challenging art, it may even be an uncomfortable place, but that's what art should do, and good art does do. So if somebody's playing a guitar, maybe they're imagining they're somewhere they've never been, or maybe they're back to a place that they loved. So by knowing all of these things, it helps me to not only have almost like an understanding and a blessing that I can be thinking about over the instrument as I'm building it for that person, but I also transform those ideas into different types of inlays and colors. There's significance and meaning in it, and as an artist, what are we always looking for but some type of inspiration. So that's what we want to do, we want to make sure that we're giving somebody a gift that has some meaning to them.