Pimentel & Sons Guitarmakers

The shop at 3316 Lafayette Drive NE stands on a corner lot in Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights, in the little two-story house Lorenzo and Josefina Pimentel bought in 1963 for about $9,000. A framed portrait of the couple hangs high on the office wall. It was taken in the late 1940s, soon after their wedding. “It was destiny that brought us together,” Josefina told New Mexico Magazine in 2011, seated beneath it. The magazine’s writer, Michelle Otero, found that the workshop had “the feel of a dear cousin’s house, the aromas of homemade tortillas and beans replaced by the sweet smell of rosewood.”

Benches on Lafayette Drive

Three of Lorenzo’s sons work the benches.

Rick (Ricardo) is president. He builds classical and steel-string acoustic guitars and designs most of the inlay. Robert (Roberto) is vice president. Like his father, he specializes in classical and flamenco guitars, and he builds the Grand Concert models. * Victor makes mandolins and ukuleles.

All three build classicals. A fourth brother, Agustín, also a master guitar maker, died of an aneurysm on February 24, 2014. Acoustic Guitar reported in 2001 that each Pimentel instrument is built entirely by one person at a single work station, with only the custom inlays passing to Rick.

The wood comes first. New lumber is aged in the family warehouse for 10 to 15 years before it is considered fit for a guitar. Lorenzo, Robert says, “was real smart when he was younger, and he bought a lot of Brazilian rosewood boards, a lot of ebony, a lot of East Indian rosewood.” Robert went to Brazil twice and could bring back no rosewood, since it is endangered. “Our woods are really nice and dry and when we get to work on them you get these great smells out of them still.”

Rick taps the book-matched top and back, two pieces cut so their grains mirror each other. One side rings brighter and the other deeper, to balance bass and treble. The brothers make their own rosettes and their own nuts and saddles of bone, and they buy nothing premade. Robert describes the bending: “We don’t even have machines to bend our sides, so we put them in water; then we use a hot oval electric iron and bend them by hand.”

Victor carves the Pimentel crown on the head of each guitar with tools he and his father made. He grinds his chisels, from 1/16 inch to 1/2 inch, out of old files. “My dad would always tell us, to become a guitar maker you have to make everything yourself,” he told Ukulele magazine in 2020. “You never stop learning,” he says of the wood, “even from the same tree, because the grain is always changing.”

A guitar takes 45 days to three months, longer when there is heavy inlay. Rick works the inlay in abalone and pearl, turquoise and red coral, gold and silver, often in Native American designs such as the dreamcatcher rosettes of the Southwestern series. “We get customers from all over the world,” he says, “and they know New Mexico for its turquoise or coral colors.” In 2015 Classical Guitar magazine put prices at $3,500 to $45,000. Robert had just finished a flamenco negra of Brazilian rosewood with a German spruce top and ebony trim, priced at $35,000.

Finished instruments still go out the door to their owners. In May 2026 the shop posted a custom acoustic concert guitar for Richard King, with myrtle back and sides, a Sitka spruce top and a turquoise rosette, played live in the shop. In August came an acoustic for Manuel Jaramillo, with bubinga back and sides and a New Mexico Zia inlaid with a bear claw for the sun.

The building also holds a showroom of the shop’s own instruments and a repair bench. The brothers repair and restore anything strung, from flamenco guitars to balalaikas, cellos and double basses, including heirlooms brought down from closet shelves. Lessons run a half hour or an hour, taught by instructors who hold at least a bachelor’s degree in music. The state and city tourism listings send visitors who want a tour of the workshop to Rick or Robert.

Two brothers who play

Two of Lorenzo’s other sons, Hector and Gustavo, became concert guitarists, and the shop books them for any occasion. Hector found his path at 12, when his father took him to hear Andrés Segovia. He went on to study with the Cuban-born Hector García, who founded a guitar department at the University of Albuquerque in the 1960s, and later with Erol Gallegos, a Segovia student.

Gustavo grew up hearing his father sing boleros: “I used to play along to the Beatles with a broom.” At 11 he heard the Romeros, the guitar quartet founded by Celedonio Romero, a close friend of Lorenzo’s. In his late teens Gustavo auditioned for a Romero master class. “I remember Pepe saying, ‘Magnífico,’ and I was thinking, ‘Oh, thank the Lord.’” When Gustavo asked Pepe Romero to take him as a student, Lorenzo offered a Grand Concert Pimentel guitar in exchange for the lessons. “Angel Romero overheard that conversation and volunteered, so that he could have the guitar instead.” Gustavo spent the next four summers studying with Pepe in San Diego.

In 2011 Hector played regularly at Casa de Benavídez in the North Valley and taught in a studio at the shop. Gustavo played at Hotel Albuquerque in Old Town and taught in a private studio.

The family also runs the Pimentel Concert Series at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, usually two concerts a year, each followed by an after-party at Hotel Albuquerque. Guests have included Los Tres Reyes, the Mexican trio formed in 1957, and Ronstadt Generations y Los Tucsonenses. The most recent concert on the shop’s events page is Manuel Barrueco on February 2, 2019. The 65th-anniversary concert on February 18, 2017 brought 16 acts to the stage, from Mariachi Tenampa to the Watermelon Mountain Jug Band. It was a tribute to Lorenzo and Agustín, and Albuquerque’s mayor, Richard J. Berry, proclaimed the date Pimentel in Business Day.

The jug band’s Ben Perea has owned Taylors, Martins and Gibsons. “I use the other guitars for my outdoor performances, because it doesn’t really matter what happens to them, but for recordings and important performances I use my Pimentel.”

From Durango to the Sandías

Lorenzo Pimentel was born in Durango, Mexico, in 1928. He learned the trade as a teenager in Ciudad Juárez from his half-brothers. The shop says he began apprenticing at 14, and the Associated Press obituary says he made his first guitar at 15.

The sources tell the next years differently:

New Mexico Magazine: after the 1948 wedding, he and Josefina lived three years in El Paso, then moved to Carlsbad. The Blue Book of Guitar Values: he went to El Paso in 1948 to work for a master violin maker named Nagoles. The shop: at 23 he made guitars in a violin store, and he opened his own shop in Carlsbad in 1951. Robert, in 2015: his father moved to El Paso in 1951 and worked at a bakery, and the family then went to Carlsbad, where Robert was born in 1953.

All agree that bread paid the bills. In a 1992 Albuquerque Journal interview, Lorenzo said he learned to bake because guitar making alone would not support him.

He built at home, in the garage, with the boys underfoot. Roberto held instruments while his father applied lacquer. Agustín ground shell for the frets and dipped it in hot water. Victor, good at math, worked out cutting angles. Each took a turn sweeping. “[Dad] would say, ‘Feel the wood,’” Rick recalls. “He’d tell me, ‘Take the wood and tap on it.’ It’s alive.”

At Josefina’s urging Lorenzo took a vacation to Albuquerque in 1963, where, Victor says, “he fell in love with the Sandía.” The family moved a few months later. The Journal dates the move to 1962. The AP says he came with a few hand tools. Local music stores turned him away. “People didn’t want Mexican guitars,” Roberto says.

The turn came in 1965, when the music magazine Frets featured his work and an order for 30 guitars followed. Lorenzo himself told the Journal the business took off thanks mainly to an article in an Arizona magazine. The publisher Mel Bay put Pimentel guitars on the covers of his guitar method books and sold them at his St. Louis store. Bay later asked for a nylon-string guitar that would feel like his D’Angelico archtop, and the result, the Jazz Classical, became one of the shop’s most successful designs. The Blue Book says steel-string acoustics began in the early 1970s. Acoustic Guitar wrote that they had been offered since the very beginning.

The boys took shop class at Garfield junior high and Albuquerque High. Rick’s team entered a house-building competition using only hand tools and came in first. Robert remembers wanting to go dancing: “My dad always said, ‘You’re not going to go dancing, you gotta work, boy!’” Gustavo remembers Sundays starting at 8 o’clock. Lorenzo told each son he could go to college or work at the shop. Victor studied architecture and came back. His father told him, “If you work here, you’re not going to make a lot of money, but you’ll work your butt off.” Agustín did classified work for the government before returning.

The recognition came over decades:

October 1978: an invitation to the Smithsonian’s 12th Annual Festival of American Folklife. October 1994: a Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts. * September 2005: a Hispanic Heritage Month Distinguished Honor.

Accepting the 2005 honor, Lorenzo said he had become a U.S. citizen only that May. He had been too busy, he said, making his business known internationally.

The Sunrise and the Santuario rosette

Words spoken by Senator Pete Domenici at a mariachi conference in Las Cruces inspired a series of guitars honoring New Mexico. The first, the Sunrise, was finished in 2007 after more than a year of work. It uses 10 kinds of imported wood aged 10 to 15 years, with inlays of coral and mother-of-pearl. Zia suns run across its face, head and fingerboard, and green and red chile motifs mark the bridge.

On March 25, 2009, the New Mexico Sunrise was named the state’s official guitar, with Governor Bill Richardson signing the bill. Classical Guitar magazine says the New Mexico Museum of Art acquired one two years later. The state tourism listing places the state guitar at the State History Museum in Santa Fe.

The shop’s Santuario rosette is named for El Santuario de Chimayó, the northern New Mexico church where the faithful believe the dirt can heal. Rick says his father went there to pray while he was dying of cancer and came back with the design.

Lorenzo died of prostate cancer in December 2010, at 82. His sons told KOAT he worked on his guitars to the end. In his last months, Josefina said, he would call Rick and ask, “Are you coming for me? Quiero trabajar.” She asked him why he wanted to go.

“Because my sons are there, next to me.”