Discovering the Venezuelan cuatro

(First published in Guitarist magazine, issue #484)

This month Alex immerses himself in the captivating sound of the Venezuelan cuatro.

A few months ago, Pedro - one of my guitar making students - completed his first guitar. As anyone who has built an acoustic guitar will attest, this huge accomplishment is celebrated by first strumming a few tunes and then prompting the all-important question: “So, what do we build next?”. My student’s answer was immediate. “A cuatro”.

If like me your first thought is “What is a cuatro?”, don’t reach for the internet search engines, instead let me try to fill you in.  Although there are a few varieties, the cuatro - Venezuela’s national instrument - has a body shape and size not dissimilar to the soprano ukulele and is equipped with four nylon strings fixed along a neck almost as long as a small guitar. Naturally, this long scale means that the tuning is a little different: A, D, F#, B. For guitarists like you and me, this actually makes the instrument instantly accessible given that the strings are essentially the same as the top of four on a guitar, tuned up a fifth. This means that your usual chords shapes will work just fine, but there is a catch. Just like the ukulele this is actually a type of reentrant tuning, meaning that the notes don’t just ascend as you pluck across the strings. In this instance the high B is actually only a tone higher than the bottom string, so an open strum produces a jazzy-sounding Dmaj6 chord.

My challenge was to help Pedro go about designing his own cuatro from the ground up, and then apply our guitar making skills to build it. Luckily, we had access to his fine collection of cuatros from some of Venezuela’s top builders. Cherry picking our favourite elements from each one, we drew everything up in CAD to generate a detailed plan drawing. Most controversially, we decided to stick to our usual methods and opt for a dovetail neck join, utilising an external mould to construct the body rather than building everything around the neck face down on a solera, bucking Spanish guitar-building tradition in the process.

One of the trickiest steps was trying to determine the final thickness of the front, back and sides. As any guitar maker will know, this is crucial to obtaining the right kind of sound. Too thin and the instrument is structurally unstable and weak sounding, but too thick and it won’t resonate to its maximum potential. We noticed in our cuatro collection that there was quite a lot of variability, with some builders having chosen to construct instruments with very thin tops but substantially thicker sides and backs. I think of this as the ‘snare drum’ approach to instrument making, creating an instrument has a stiff frame to contain all the sound energy bouncing around in the soundboard. The instruments built with a more delicate frame seemed to project a mellower tone, radiating the sound out in all directions.

Of course, wood selection is very important when it comes to trying to dial in the tone of your instrument. Just like in traditional classical guitar making, Spanish cedar is extensively used in the neck for the Venezuelan cuatro, but Pedro opted for a more flashy figured maple on the neck to contrast with a beautiful set of Santos Rosewood back and sides. Ziricote was used for the fingerboard, headstock veneer and bridge to ensure that his cuatro would stand out in a crowd.

This week we finally tuned Pedro’s cuatro up for the first time and gave it a set up. The cuatro is played with a percussive right hand attack which demands a much higher action than one might expect on the guitar. Happily, we were not disappointed with the tone: a lively projection, and a conga-like percussive clarity. It was a pleasure to be involved in the creation of this instrument and I’ve developed a real love of Venezuelan music along the way. The hours spent building this symbolic instrument were an education in itself, soundtracked on the workshop stereo by the groundbreaking talents of virtuoso musicians like Jorge Glem and Miguel Siso. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, the Venezuelan cuatro is an instrument that truly embodies its nation’s musical identity. A digital copy of the plans for this Venezuelan cuatro are available here from Bristol Guitar Making school