How I Came to the 10-String Guitar — and Why I Never Looked Back
I didn’t grow up in a family of professional musicians. My parents were top athletes. But I did grow up in a family where books, curiosity, and learning meant something.
My maternal grandfather, Matthys Meyer, loved music deeply. He and his identical twin were born into the poverty of the Great Depression, which meant they couldn’t study music formally. But they taught themselves — by ear. Piano. Accordion. Organ. Mouth organ. Guitar. He played whatever he could get his hands on. And some of my earliest memories of music are of Oupa Thys sitting at his upright piano.
His old Yamaha guitar eventually found its way behind the study door of our home in Johannesburg. I was around nine when my school introduced a group guitar class. We were taught a handful of basic chords — strummed G, D, C… but I felt something missing. When a song called for a G7 and we played a G major, something in me knew it wasn’t right. I didn’t need to be told the harmony. I felt it. So I started teaching myself the chords that the group wasn’t being shown.
And from there, it grew. I taught myself to read notation. I explored the fingerboard. I borrowed everything I could from Johannesburg’s excellent Music Library — esoteric works, baroque tablatures, graphic scores by Cage and Stockhausen… I played Sor’s Mozart Variations (Yepes edition) and Tárrega’s Las dos hermanitas at school functions. I performed Vivaldi’s Mandolin Concerto in C major on an antique mandolin I barely knew how to hold. I devoured anything that sounded unfamiliar.
Then, one day, I saw it. On South African television: a guitar that didn’t look like the familiar one. A 10-string guitar, played by David Hewitt — a great student of Fritz Buss and Narciso Yepes.
I didn’t even know how many strings it had. I just knew I wanted one.
A year or so later, my father returned from the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona and brought back a handful of classical guitar recordings — John Williams, Pepe Romero, Lendle, and a box set of Narciso Yepes
I was young, but I knew what I liked — and what I didn’t. I didn’t care for displays of speed or hollow “perfection.” I heard something different in Romero, but in Yepes… I heard a sound that made no apologies. Something old and new at once. Raw, philosophical, mysterious, sincere. Something that felt like truth.
I couldn’t explain it then. I don’t think I want to now. This is not a place of words. It’s deeper. Visceral.
We looked for a 10-string guitar for years. Nothing. Eventually, while having a violin repaired, a luthier mentioned a South African builder who made 10-strings. My father commissioned one. I received it just before the end of 1995.
And then — by pure accident — one of my father’s former athletes, Harry Hofmeyr, came by to say goodbye before moving to Grahamstown. He heard me playing the Sor Variations and told me: “There’s someone you have to meet…”
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That someone was Fritz Buss.
Harry’s lesson spot opened up when he moved, and I started studying with Fritz on the first Thursday of January, 1996. I arrived with a 10-string guitar already in my hands.
No one had to convince me. No one had to explain why the 10-string was better, or different. I had already heard it. Felt it. It was destiny. That’s the only word that fits.
My first 10-string was beautiful — Brazilian rosewood, pearl inlays. But it didn’t sound right for what I wanted. I replaced it a few years later with a 1974 Ramírez, previously owned by David Hewitt, who had just passed away after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. The same David Hewitt I saw on television as a child. I still play that guitar today.
Fritz’s method was structured, of course. Studies by Sor, Coste, Pujol… even his own, which were invaluable, especially for the development of the right hand. But from the start, he allowed me to pursue the music that called to me — early music, new music, unconventional transcriptions and interpretations. He let me explore paths that were unfamiliar to him, and that kind of openness — that kind of trust — is rare.
Over time, our relationship evolved — from teacher and student to something more collaborative, collegial, and then to friendship. Fritz is a rare kind of human being: authentic, intellectually gifted, deeply ethical, and unbreakably strong. He gave me space to be and to become myself.
I didn’t fall in love with the guitar because of its repertoire. Truthfully, I found most of it dull, emotionally limited, predictable. I felt the guitar had more to say. That’s why I turned to piano works by Philip Glass; to avant-garde works by Stanley Glasser, inspired by African music; to Leonardo Balada’s Analogías; to baroque lute manuscripts, and beyond…
The 10-string guitar changed everything. It gave me a voice I couldn’t find in the six-string world. But it came at a cost. Most of the classical guitar world doesn’t welcome difference or critical thought. There are gatekeepers everywhere — people who have tried to mock or marginalize artists’ work without ever understanding it.
But they never succeeded. And they never will.
I didn’t choose the 10-string guitar to be different. I chose it because it told the truth.
Because it allowed me to ask questions, not just restate the received views.
Because it opened up not just more strings, but a deeper listening. “The deeper voice of the guitar,” as Fritz calls it.
Because it wasn’t about superficial perfection.
It was about being authentic — not in the HIPster sense of the word but in the other, truer meaning of it.
And that’s all I’ve ever tried to be.
