S1 Ep 1: Cochran & McAllister in Sutherland, Scotland

I’m Matthew Cochran. Welcome to the first episode of the Classical Guitar Dispatch, a new podcast dedicated to telling the story of the guitar. The first season of the show covers music from Asencio to Dowland to Tárrega. I speak with current and former members of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, discuss economic and demographic trends affecting students and educators, and I go behind the scenes at international guitar festivals. I’ll dig into arranging and recording, and you’re all invited to join the Classical Guitar Dispatch Book Club. This summer’s read covers A Life On the Road, Tony Palmer’s fly-on-the-wall account of Julian Bream at the peak of his career. This week’s show is part memoir and part travelogue, a format I plan to return to from time to time. As the show finds its footing, I’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions. My hope is that the Classical Guitar Dispatch provides a sounding board for all members of the guitar community. Wherever you are in the world, whatever your interests, whether you’re just starting out or you’re a grizzled, road-hardened pro, or, if the sound of my voice just helps you get to sleep, all are welcome.

Today’s Dispatch comes from County Sutherland in Scotland, where Matthew McAllister and I visit luthier Michael Ritchie, busk at a bakery, lead an accidental singalong, and take home a brand-new guitar. Let’s get started.

It’s not easy to travel from my home in Traverse City, located in Michigan’s northwestern Lower Peninsula, to Strath Halladale in the northern part of mainland Scotland. But the promise of a new guitar from luthier Michael Ritchie and the start of a spring tour with my duo partner, Matthew McAllister, more than justified the effort. After a series of flights, Matthew and I met in Inverness. He flew from his home base in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and was in jolly spirits as he retrieved his bag from the luggage carousel, which he balanced alongside two guitar cases, one containing a traditional six-string guitar and another with a ten-string instrument. Matthew has made this trip several times, and he has that “just wait until you see this” face that I’ve come to expect from trips like this.

I arrived in Inverness after flying without a guitar for the first time in recent memory. It was an eerily peaceful experience, traveling without the constant, low-grade anxiety of handing over the primary tool of my livelihood to an overworked baggage handler or an irritable flight attendant. As the throng of golfers and salmon anglers passed by, Matthew and I met the men we had come to see, master luthier Michael Ritchie, flanked by his son, Hamish. We loaded guitars and gear into Michael’s Volvo, one of those classic wagon models with a mileage counter that loses its relevance long before the car loses functionality. We began the last two-and-a-half hours of our trip starting on the commercialized A9 and then moving onto a 40-mile stretch of single-lane road that’s more populated by grazing sheep than motorists. We passed iconic dry-stone boundary walls through the Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland, where the world’s first peatland, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, teems with birdlife and bog moss. The dirt road narrowed, and we arrived at a stone cottage on an idyllic piece of farmland in Strath Halladale, featuring a handful of outbuildings dedicated to the two ventures that keep the family busy, Michael Ritchie’s guitar shop and his partner Susan Wallace’s small batch pop-up bakery, Loaf, known online as the Peat Bog Baker.

In his previous life, Michael Ritchie was a guitar tech traveling for months-long stints with indie bands like Belle and Sebastian and Franz Ferdinand, who rode to prominence during the heyday of the corporate touring economy in the 90s and early aughts. Michael problem-solved overheating amps, readjusted truss rods, and maintained fussy vintage gear while thousands of concert goers chanted along to “Take Me Out.” Meanwhile, Susan was (and still is) the lead singer of the Glasgow-based trip-hop duo Cinephile, who built their reputation on television and film soundtracks. On paper, it might be difficult to square Michael and Susan’s transition from road-dog to peat bog, but after spending a couple of days with the Ritchies, it’s easy to see the appeal of a mostly off-grid lifestyle in rural Scotland devoted to family, bread, and guitars.

Michael showed me to the cabin where I would stay, a cozy hut just big enough for a bed, a heating unit, and a toilet-and-sink combo. Meanwhile, Matthew got the in-house option, bunking in Hamish’s room alongside Legos and remote-controlled cars. It was Friday, which meant Susan and her assistant Paco were busy in the baking shed, preparing the 350 or so individual sourdoughs, pastries, loaves, and cakes that would go to market the next morning. The smell was glorious, but my gluten intolerance meant those smells were as close as I could get to sampling Susan’s work without risking an undignified episode in the smallest room of their cottage. For the record, I gave in to temptation twice during my visit. Also, for the record, it was worth it.

I tried to nap, but even after a 25-hour trek, the new guitar occupied my thoughts. This particular guitar was about three years in the planning. Matthew McAllister and I gave our first duo concert in February 2023 in Crail, a little seaport town on the East Coast of Scotland. I love playing with Matthew. He makes every phrase sound like he’s making it up on the spot, while simultaneously making it sound as though it always existed. Of course, it’s not all fun and games, and we occasionally need to go into ensemble problem-solving mode. For example, getting our two sounds to match has proved challenging. Some of that is due to the fact that Matthew’s sound is produced by organic matter (i.e., his fingernails), and my sound is produced by synthetic matter (i.e., plastic nail tips and super glue). Those different materials cause a volume imbalance, which is annoying, but they are a far subtler issue than the challenges of balancing the actual instruments that we have played over the past three years.

In 2007, Delta’s baggage goons smashed my 1993 Robert Ruck, and the American luthier Stephan Connor came through with an excellent, punchy replacement. The Connor is a loud guitar with a thin top, a sound port, modern bracing, and materials that favor midrange frequencies. Originally built for Eliot Fisk and later owned by Angel Romero, the Connor was an ideal companion for nearly 20 years and has more than earned its now comfortable retirement.

As Matthew and I continue to increase our concert bookings over the next couple of seasons, and we develop the material for our second album, we’ve decided to address the problem of matching our dynamics head-on.

As someone who makes a living playing, teaching, recording, and writing for and about the guitar, I admit that I have a non-scientific and, at times, downright mystical understanding of what makes a great guitar great. I am more concerned about how I feel and what I hear when I play a fine handmade instrument than I am curious about how it was made. A luthier’s artistry only becomes evident to me when I clock how an instrument feels in my lap, vibrates against my chest, and how I perceive the sound when I play.

Subjective? Yes.

But that subjectivity led me to a recent fascination with so-called “traditional” Spanish guitar construction, which dates back to the 1800s and began with the Andalusian luthier Antonio Torres, many of whose methods are still practiced today, notably in Granada. I enjoy the balanced frequency range these guitars produce, which, to my ears, gives them a warm, rich, and rounded tone.

When it comes to traditional guitar construction, many in the UK consider Michael Ritchie one of the best in the business. So, when Matthew showed up for a duo gig with a brand-new cedar-top instrument fresh from Michael’s shop, featuring a small body and cocobolo back and sides, I knew exactly what I wanted. Matthew and I hatched a plan to approach Michael about making a second guitar with the same design and materials.

So, in July of that year, as Michael set up his table for the luthier’s exhibit at the Classical Guitar Retreat at St Andrews, Scotland, I made a beeline for the unsuspecting luthier with a challenge. At first, Michael was resistant to the idea. “I can’t guarantee they will sound the same,” Michael said. “I mean, I can probably get them close if I use the same or similar materials, but it’s not a science. There are countless unknowns when dealing with wood, so if you want the same guitar as Matthew, there’s a good chance you’ll be disappointed.”

“That’s fair,” I admitted. “But you know…a pair of guitars made in the same shop by the same luthier using the same materials will get us a hell of a lot closer to the sound we imagine in our heads than what we can otherwise achieve. Plus, regardless of how well the two guitars match, I know it’ll be a killer instrument.”

Michael crossed his arms, which I’ve come to know as his thinking pose. After more than a little silence, he nodded, uncrossed his arms, and shook my hand.

Challenge accepted.

Michael produces guitars in his Strath Halladale shop, but the methods he employs are rooted in his time in Granada, where he lived, learned, and practiced his craft in the storied Barrio Del Realejo. There’s a traditionalism that permeates those building practices, including glue made from all kinds of animal and fish parts, which I try not to think too much about, but if you listen to Michael waxing rhapsodic about affixing a brace using hides and glands, you can see the romance. He says, “There’s something poetic about the old ways, and it adds joy to the work.”

That joy was on display as Michael lifted his latest instrument from the humidification case and placed it in my hands for the first time. I set the guitar on my lap, tuned it, and played a chord. Matthew set up cameras and microphones to record the moment. I felt a bit out of body, playing while listening, listening while playing an instrument I will practice, write, and perform on, and will be my primary traveling companion for the foreseeable future. It occurred to me that playing a guitar I commissioned for the first time is not unlike a first date, with all the hopes and insecurities that come with the experience. Though for this particular first date, I had already signed the marriage certificate and booked the photographer. Unlike any other first date I’ve ever been on, the experience of playing Michael’s newest instrument lived up to my expectations. The next test was to see how the sister guitars sounded together. Matthew grabbed an arrangement I sent him during a layover the day before from J.S. Bach’s Actus tragicus Cantata BWV 106. By the end of the first phrase, Michael, Matthew, and I knew we had something special. Matthew and I spent the afternoon in Michael’s shop, working through our repertoire, growing increasingly excited about the new, balanced sound we were hearing. Finally, the exhaustion from the trip overcame our excitement, and we headed back to Michael and Susan’s cottage and celebrated with what the Scotsmen inaccurately described as a “wee” dram. I slept very well that night.

I woke the next morning to the sounds and smells of bakery preparations. There were plumes of smoke coming from Susan’s baking hut. Crates of bread, pastry, and cakes covered every surface of the kitchen and spread to the living room in the cottage. Michael, Paco, and Hamish loaded a van and their Volvo with product, while Matthew and I packed for a bit of low-pressure busking at the bake shop to promote our evening concert. That was Michael’s idea, and it proved to be a good one.

After a cup of coffee and the first certifiably worthwhile gluten risk of the tour, consisting of a moist and rich pistachio cake made from spelt flour, Matthew and I loaded into the van driven by Paco, a convivial fellow from Valencia, who first visited Northern Scotland with the intention of staying for a summer and never left. There was just enough room to fit guitars and concert gear among the baked goods, and we careened down the one-lane road toward our first delivery of sourdough at the Reay Golf Club. From there, it was a straight shot along the coast of the North Sea to Thurso. When we arrived, Michael and Hamish were already rushing bread crates from the Volvo Wagon through a brewer’s basement and up a rickety set of stairs, and into the Bakery. Matthew and I followed with guitars, set up in a corner, and began tuning while the line of customers snaked down Traill Street, waiting for Susan to open the shop.

A couple of hours later, the shelves were cleared out. The last of the locals said their farewells, and a few loaves of sourdough—serving as the only remaining proof of Susie and Paco’s baking efforts that week—were taken to a local coffee shop and sliced for sandwiches. Matthew and I packed up and headed to our sound check at Thurso West Church, which was first established in 1860 as a “Free Church” and later became part of the Church of Scotland in 1929. Michael was present at the sound check to listen to the sister guitars in action. He paced from one corner of the sanctuary to the other, arms crossed, listening closely. Matthew called out to Michael, who had sneaked into the balcony, “What are you hearing?”

“All good from here, boys.”

“Balance?”

“Aye. Better now. How does it feel, Matthew C?”

“Feels great, Michael. I’m really pushing the top string. Is it too much?”

“You can push. It won’t go splat on you.”

We went to Capilla Tapas Restaurant for dinner, which overlooks Scrabster Harbor, where trawlers hauling whitefish were nearly finished bringing in the day’s catch. I noticed a tiny landmass jutting into the distance and asked Matthew what it was. “Those are the Orkneys. In fact, that’s Stromness just there.” You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know the small seaport town of Stromness, an old Viking settlement that currently supports about 2,500 residents. But to me, just seeing the silhouette of Stromness was akin to a celebrity sighting. That’s because Stromness is named-checked in the 1980 Peter Maxwell Davies musical The Yellow Cake Revue. At the time, uranium mining posed a very real threat to the region, and Maxwell Davies, a longtime Orkney resident, composed The Yellow Cake Revue as a protest. Nestled among the cabaret-style songs that propel the narrative, a little piano interlude called “Farewell to Stromness” emerged as one of Maxwell Davies’ most beloved pieces. Like the solo piano works of Albeniz and Granados, “Farewell to Stromness” was quickly and successfully adapted to the guitar and has become a staple of the repertoire. I found it irksome to be within spitting distance of Stromness, knowing our tour schedule wouldn’t allow for a quick ferry to the town. Matthew, who has performed in Stromness as part of the St. Magnus Festival and is familiar with the local audience, suggested we add “Farewell to Stromness” to the evening’s program. That idea also proved to be a good one.

By concert hour, the church was packed. We stepped into the sanctuary, gave our bows, and recognized most of the faces in the audience from the bakery earlier that day. Susan and Michael sat in the front row, and I felt a bit nervy, wanting to give Michael’s new guitar the best debut performance I could manage. And it almost went off without a hitch. During a particularly strummy moment in our arrangement of Chick Corea’s “Spain,” I hammered on a chord that knocked the soundhole tuner right off its clamp, dislodging the battery and sending the entire mechanism flying into the back of the guitar with a clank. It sounded like a pinball machine. Live performance is always an adventure.

There was no printed program, and we announced our pieces from the stage. When we got to “Farewell to Stromness,” the audience let out a collective sigh of recognition, and I’m sure I could make out people singing along as we played the piece. It was a thrill to hear a staple of the guitar repertoire given the hero treatment by a decidedly non-guitar, mostly bakery audience.

Back at the cottage, we settled in for one of those late-night conversations that are sort of a debate, but the kind of debate that makes your face hurt from laughter. I’m pretty sure we solved a few of the world’s problems, and I’d happily share the solutions if I could only remember what they were. I gave up around the time Michael and Matthew started in on cryptocurrency, and left the old friends sitting at the kitchen table, drinking, bickering, and laughing. I just remembered to duck my head to avoid a low beam when the shock of the night air forced me to inhale, and I looked up at a sky free of light pollution, the smell of woodworking and bread baking still in the air, and the feel of the damp, ancient soil under my feet. And for the second night in a row, I slept very well.

Monday morning, we took the two-and-a-half-hour trip back through magical terrain, and my mood darkened as we pulled up to the Inverness train station. If you ever find yourself in a situation where it is genuinely difficult to say goodbye to friends and you are considering calling your wife to discuss leaving your life in Michigan and moving to the Flow Country of Northern Scotland, I highly recommend the ScotRail route from Inverness to Edinburgh, which cuts through the Highlands, hugging the Cairngorms National Park. The trip may not convince you to stay in Michigan, but it will provide you with a renewed appreciation for how stunning all of Scotland is, so just for now, maybe keep your options open.

On the train, Matthew and I did a bit of tour planning, discussed programming for the next album, and caught each other up on the comings and goings of the people in our lives. Matthew mentioned that he ran into his mother while shopping in Belfast. “Shopping, huh?” I asked, “For what?” “A ring for Eleanor,” he answered. “A ring?” “No,” he said, with what I can only describe as a shit-eating grin, “The ring.”

The rest of that story involves fermented shark, a serious winter storm, and a broken-down bus in a remote part of Iceland. But that’s another trip. So, stay tuned to the Classical Guitar Dispatch for more tales from the road, plus interviews, composition tips, listening and reading recommendations, histories, and more. Next week, I speak with Kevin Vigil, Stanley Yates, and Chuck Hullihan for Part 1 of my series, “The Noble Profession,” an examination of the guitar teaching industrial complex.

As always, I want to hear from you, so let me know in the comments what you think of today’s episode and what you’d like to hear on future shows. For listeners who subscribe to Classical Guitar Dispatch on Substack, I’ve included a free download link to my arrangement of J.S. Bach’s “Sinfonia” from Cantata BWV 106. You can also get full transcripts of the show and a playlist of all the pieces I mention. To keep up with my performances and compositions, follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok at @matthewccochran. Classical Guitar Dispatch is written and produced by yours truly. All compositions by Matthew Cochran. Music featured on this episode is from the album Pale Blue Dot by Cochran & McAllister on Sacred Black Records, and is used by permission. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll talk soon.

I’m Matthew Cochran, host of the Classical Guitar Dispatch, this brand-new podcast that you are kind enough to be listening to. Normally, the tagline that I’ll use to end my intro is that the show is dedicated to telling the story of the guitar. And while that statement is true, it’s not the whole, entire truth.

The whole, entire truth is that I’m on a mission to find the soul of the guitar. And look, I know how that sounds. It’s a frankly embarrassing statement for me to make. I worry that you will think it’s pretentious, cheesy, and self-indulgent. And maybe it is. But I turn 50 this year, which means I’m on the back nine of my time as a conscious entity on this little blue orb. And so far, most of my good memories involve the guitar. Most of the beauty I’ve experienced has been in some way shaped by the guitar. I play the guitar, write music for it, record myself and others playing it, and I love it. I just love it.

But there’s a frustrating element to loving the guitar, particularly the classical guitar. And that is how profoundly misunderstood the instrument is. Even in specialist circles, it’s often portrayed as the cartoon version of itself. You know, the hyper-macho, Spanish Romance version of the instrument. That may have something to do with the fact that every regional, semi-professional, or professional orchestra puts the Aranjuez on its Valentine’s Day concert or its "Spanish Fire Fundraising Extravaganza" once every five seasons or so. Yet, if you’d like to hear one of the hundreds of other guitar concertos available by any composer whose name is not Rodrigo, I mean, just forget it.

As far as music institutions go, there’s a constant drumbeat from administrators to sell the guitar as the everything instrument, which, of course, dilutes the quality of their offerings and makes the guitar into an advertising tagline.  Like, “come to our school, and our single-person guitar faculty who by the way studied classical guitar performance will magically make you an expert in jazz slash rock slash songwriting slash composition slash music production slash classical/flamenco blah blah blah…which, if you know anything about how hard each one of those individual artistic disciplines are, then you know that those admissions programs, development offices, and marketing teams are, knowingly or not, slinging a load of horseshit just to get another student in the door because they care way more about their job security than they care about actually educating the students who pay those salaries. By the way, if this sounds heretical, don’t take my word for it, just look up dwindling enrollment numbers, demographic shifts, and superimpose those numbers onto how many eliminated positions, cost-cutting measures, and music school closures there have been over the past decade or so, and do your own math.

That’s the way I view the state of affairs in the most visible areas of the mainstream classical music profession, so it’s no wonder how superficially the guitar is presented to the general public. But I’m sooooo tired of seeing the guitar as a prop in press photos and Instagram posts that aren’t about the guitar at all; they’re just thirst traps that want me to buy stuff or click on a link or whatever. And I’m exhausted by my YouTube or TikTok channel’s dumb algorithm that thinks I want to hear Leyenda. Again. Played pretty well. Again. By yet another person that the algorithm thinks I will find attractive. Again. Please don’t misunderstand me here, I have nothing against youth and beauty. It’s a time-tested mechanism to get people’s attention. If that’s what you’ve got to offer, go for it. And if that’s all you need from the guitar, you know, have fun or whatever.   

But for me, it’s just not enough. I mean, we live in an age when most of the music written for the guitar is available for us to play, to listen to, to enjoy. Much of the repertoire has been recorded, in some cases multiple times, by some of the greatest artists to ever play the instrument.  The guitar has breadth, depth, history, and profound expressions of the human condition. Yet, if my feed has anything to say about it, I’m supposed to be happy with advertising. I’m supposed to be satisfied with the most superficial AI-generated, Spotify playlist-type crap. To just gobble it up as if I don’t know the difference between quality and garbage.  

But I think I do know the difference, and that’s exactly why I’m not satisfied. And I bet a lot of you know the difference between quality and garbage, too. And you aren’t satisfied. Especially if you’re even vaguely aware that the level of performance at the professional level is as high as it’s ever been; there are resources, there are festivals, there are student-level opportunities, there is a growing adult learner community out there, it is truly a golden age for lovers of the classical guitar, but only if you know where to look. This new podcast chronicles my personal search for the guitar’s soul. And I’m gonna warn you upfront: it’s a deep, nerdy dive into something, maybe only a few of us care about, and that’s just fine with me. I’ll let Joe Rogan talk to the masses; he doesn’t need my help. I’m looking for meaning, for knowledge, for beauty, for human connections in this enormous, yet somehow hidden world of the classical guitar. I’ll try to share my discoveries in a way that is entertaining, but never pandering. And I want you to join me. So, let’s make it official: for the Classical Guitar Dispatch, I’m Matthew Cochran. Let’s get started.