New unexplored expression of sound  ten-string classical guitar (audio)

(Historia do Mar)

Marco Campos is a Brazilian musician and composer and plays a ten-string classical guitar. Apart from his concerts, he composes music for film theatre and ballet. His music, essentially structured on Brazilian rhythms, each year is reaching a greater international recognition. He has a very particular technique and sound, which contains a bit of samba, a bit of classical and a bit of blues, making his music really unique. And his instrument is also quite unique. Ten string classical guitar (count that the 4 additional strings are all in the basses, so we have from 1st to 6th as usual, plus a 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th string.
And from his own words we have now a full illustrated tale of his magic guitar:

Classical 10 strings guitar

Classical 10 strings guitar

"The first time I saw and heard a ten-string guitar, I was watching a performance of Joaquin Rodrigo's "Concerto de Aranjuez", played by the late Spanish concertist Narciso Yepes. I was a child, around the age of fourteen, and had begun to learn the instrument. Preserving the impression and the emotions that the timbre of the instrument had caused me, I came to elaborate, many years later, that it was above all the characteristic of the singularity, the personality of the instrument that so captivated me. It was a guitar, but it reached regions and harmonic resonances that other guitars did not produce. From a certain moment, in my work as a composer, still on the conventional six-string guitar, I began to make guitar music  with increasingly lower tunings, without realizing that perhaps, in my heart, I was trying to reproduce a sound ambience I had heard still as a child, and it captivated me so much. When I went to order a conventional guitar for the luthier Mário Passos, he suggested that my music would need a singular instrument, a ten-string classical guitar. I felt that he was right. The singularity, the unique language, the utterly personal expression,  always were a quest in my work as a composer and instrumentalist and the ten-string classical guitar harmonised with this approach. It was a guitar, but a special guitar. And I always hoped that my music would also be an absolutely unique expression.

For more than a year I followed the entire process of making my guitar. I've known it since it was just a sheet of wood, where I gently touched it to feel its resonance. And since then, since when it did not yet exist, it has touched close to my heart." (Marco Campos)