VOCCOLI GUITARS

ABOUT

Voccoli Guitars are hand crafted instruments made in Brooklyn, New York by luthier and musician Victor V. Gurbo.  Inspired by vintage designs and a love for eco-friendly materials, all of my instruments are made from reclaimed or salvaged lumber.  Not only are these materials healthy for our environment, but the aged wood simply sounds better.  When wood ages, the natural resin in the wood dries and solidifies naturally, leaving the pores in the material open to reverberate.  Most modern guitars are made of fresh “green” wood that is “kiln-dried,” a process that, while it dries the wood, seals in the resin before it can crystallize – creating a dead sounding material that isn’t open to vibrations.  This is why vintage instruments sound so good – because they’ve had ages to dry out. 

      All Voccoli Guitars start out like this, already having been air dried for years.  Also, all of my guitars are finished in a vintage gun-stock material called Tru-oil.  Modern finishes like polyurethane sit on the body of the instrument, basically like wrapping its sonic properties in a heavy blanket.  Tru-oil is absorbed by the wood through months of curing, allowing the instrument to breath and express its sound organically while still remaining durable to the elements.  All of my instruments are one-offs, painstakingly handmade and completely individual.  

      Victor V. Gurbo is a self-taught musician and luthier.  With a long family history of Italian opera singers and musicians on my mother’s side and Norwegian artisans and woodworkers on my father’s side, it was only natural that I was drawn to making things that make music.  After graduating from The Macaulay Honors College with a BFA in Fine Art and an Honors BA in English, I began to pursue a career in song writing using what I studied in school.  As an outlet for my art, I began painting on the guitars that I used in my performances. This led to modifying them and taking them apart to see how they worked.  I’ve always believed that art and craft are synonymous, so I began to experiment with making my own instruments as my artistic expression.  I started researching vintage and archaic designs too - things that weren't practical for mass production or ideas that simply fell by the wayside.  I also began to study “legendary” instruments wielded by famous performers – fascinated by the lore of the individuality and character these tools possessed.  Armed with knowledge and obsession, each Voccoli guitar is “interesting” to say the least. 

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