So here is a deep dive to find out all that I could about Ignacio ‘Nacho” BaƱos.
Ignacio BaƱos. grew up in the beautiful Spanish town of Valencia. Like so many of us who were bitten by the ‘guitar bug’ he became obsessed with vintage Fender Telecasters from the 1950’s.
During the summer semester Nacho started his travelling to take a course in the UK to learn English at Stroud in Gloucestershire, This was followed by stays in Canterbury and Plymouth.
It was that course in Plymouth England that led BaƱos to head west spending a summer in Boston, Massachusetts where he would later return to spend two years at the University as part of his Economics MBA course at Valencia University.. Nacho admits that he was not a great student, frequently distracted in the mornings on the way to class by students heading the other way to the Berklee School of Music.
His first guitar was a Telecaster that his father bought him in 1986 despite a preference for Classical Music. As an undergraduate student in his hometown of Valencia, Spain,
Ignacio BaƱos then signed up to live with an American family for a summer to improve his English. But BaƱos didn’t want just any American experience—he wanted the full American experience.
He states that he wrote a letter to the organizers of the program,” he says, “and in my letter I said, ‘I want to be a cowboy. I want to go to rodeos. I like country music a lot.’ As the other students in his program caught flights to California—“everyone wanted to go to California”—BaƱos boarded a plane to Boise.
He spent the summer of 1985 on an Idaho farm, riding horses, milking cows, slaughtering chickens, driving pickup trucks, and cheering fellow cowboys at the rodeo. “I came back with the full outfit,” he says. “Cowboy hat, cowboy boots, everything.” Complete immersion is BaƱos’ way. He doesn’t have interests; he has obsessions.
“If you like something, like it all the way,” he says. “If you want to do something, do it all the way.
It was during this period in his life that BaƱos became so fanatical was he about buying and playing vintage Fender guitars that he would sacrifice the money for his mid-morning snack to save for guitars in the United States.
He commented that he once moved from a comfortable student apartment to a cheap, basement flat in order to save money for guitars. His family was footing his living expenses, so with the money he save he could indulge in purchasing guitars.
During his time in America, in 1989, he found a vintage 1950’s Broadcaster for sale by a music store in Lexington, Kentucky. The price was $4500. He contacted the store and was told they had just sold the guitar to G.E. Smith, the guitarist and band leader for Saturday Night Live.
Nacho was devastated, but a short time later the store contacted him to let him know that Smith returned the guitar as he did not like the guitar because he thought it was too heavy. Nacho bought the guitar.
On a trip to San Francisco, he noticed that there were a lot of shops selling, not the latest guitars, but old vintage ones from the 50s and 60s; and on album covers he noticed too that all his idols had old guitars. The seeds of the idea for a shop and a business were planted.
Over the ensuing decades, BaƱos self-published The Blackguard: A Detailed History of the Early Fender Telecaster Years 1950–1954, a massive and meticulously researched coffee-table book that is now highly collectible. This volume was included in
The Pinecaster Book Collection.
In 1994 he returned to Spain after receiving his MBA, and started working in the family business, Plastinsa, which manufactures plastic bottles for beverages and provides marketing materials for that industry. He now runs the company. He states his job involves a lot of international travelling, and in the coming months he would be visiting China, Germany and the USA.
His day job routine involves tooling and houseware products manufacturing. There are different processes involved before you reach the final product completion. Quality control and trackability systems are applied to assure every step of the way is correctly executed, so if problems arise they can be clearly identified, analyzed and solved in the most aseptic manner.
It was in 2010, BaƱos decided to try his hand at building a line of his own self-made 1950 Fender Telecaster replicas that he called Nacho Guitars which pay homage to the blackguards he so adored, and the guitars he had acquired and encountered during his research served as a technical, tonal and, perhaps most importantly, tactile reference for his own preference.
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| Nachocaster |
BaƱos states, “I’m not a luthier,” he says. “If you asked me to build an archtop or an acoustic guitar, no way. I’m not that talented. But I was passionate enough that, for 25 years, I gained hands-on experience with these guitars.” Produced in batches of 30 by BaƱos and a team of three builders, Nachoguitars strive to replicate the tone, look, and feel of the solid-body electric guitars from the early 1950s to which they pay tribute.
That said, the wood parts incorporate deliberate deviations in routing and dimensions that prevent the parts from being used by any would-be forgers attempting to pass them off as original vintage pieces. “All it takes is five minutes and a screwdriver for someone to know what’s going on,”
BaƱos says the Nacho’s pickups and most of its hardware are also crafted from materials as close to original spec as possible.
One luxury Leo Fender and his workers certainly did not have was the time to match each guitar body and neck, a process that BaƱos and his team take great pains to get right. “We call pairing the right neck and body a ‘marriage.’ We try to find grooms and brides,” he says.
“The most important thing is the neck pocket. Even though the wood parts are cut on CNC machines, there’s always a tolerance on the specs. "That means one neck might be a perfect fit on one body but not on the next, even though both necks and both bodies were cut on the same machine on the same day, using the same program. We spend a few days matching those until we get it right. Once you have that, anything you do on top of that is a plus.”
Nacho Guitars have no assembly lines. BaƱos and two fellow craftspeople painstakingly carve, cut, bolt, wind, solder, paint, stain, and distress guitars and most of their components by hand in a small Valencia workshop. Each year, they make four batches of 15 to 20 guitars, and loyal customers, who range from dentists and lawyers who play music on the weekend to professional studio musicians to legit rock stars, eagerly await each release.
“One of our best clients is Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top,” BaƱos says. “Jeff Tweedy from Wilco uses our guitars all the time.”
The production marks are quality control checks. Other notable customers include Julian Lage and Redd Volkaert. Both of these men own two Nachocasters.
Different people were performing different tasks that were identified by a date, a signature, a stamp… this way if something went wrong, they could easily track it down and determine the simplest way to solve it. Fenders' Gloria, Virginia and Mary were soldering and dating wiring harnesses. If a wiring problem was found in a given guitar, the controller could easily identify who and when the soldering job was completed and decide to check the whole production batch made on that date by that particular worker.
The same applied to Fenders' Charlie Davis, Tadeo Gomez and Eddie Miller when they signed and dated bodies and necks. I am not sure what the D stamp stands for, but I believe it is an initial check.
Some worker (Paul Dallmeir?) was stamping/approving wood and metal parts before they went into the finishing/lacquering/plating process. It makes a lot of sense to make sure no extra process costs were added on top of already flawed components.
Nacho gives all of his guitars women's names. When somebody buys a guitar from BaƱos they can also choose the name they like. Some people like to name guitars after their wives, girlfriends, daughters… It’s like, “Yes honey, I bought another guitar but it’s named after you!”
BaƱos does not make custom guitars. He and his team average around 100 handmade guitars a year. If you are interested you just buy his stock on hand. In addition to Telecaster replicas he also hand builds 1954 Stratocaster replicas.
His replicated Telecasters weigh in at around 7.2 pounds and featured an updated 9.5-inch fretboard radius, 6105 fret wire, and pickups wired in modern fashion versus the period-correct “dark circuit.” The ample and eminently playable neck had a soft V in the lower register that transitioned to a rounder contour in the upper registers.
If you want a genuine 1951 Fender Telecaster or a 1950 Telecaster, be prepared to write a check for $200K to $350K.
However if you are looking for a Nachocaster, with aspects so similar to the original, you can purchase one for $5500 to $7500 USD.
BaƱos does not limit his stock to Telecasters or Esquires.
He also builds replicas of 1956 Fender Stratocasters,
and 1950's Precision Basses.
