UVA History

...as told by Alejandro Lagos

The Begining

The unofficial history of UVA Instruments goes back to 1976, Puerto Montt, Chile, where I decided to join a public school choir. That particular choir also had a ten-guitar section performing with it. I wanted to sing, more than anything, but six months down the road my voice started to change. Because I still wanted to be a part of the choir, my teacher Obriel Oyarzun advised me to pick up the guitar. With great sadness in my heart, I did so. That was the beginning. One of my friends - Miguel Angel Trujillo - at the time had an electric guitar he had built himself. Inspired by his example (and high prices on electric guitars), I decided to do the same. Without much guidance, I made my first Les Paul copy using a picture from an album cover. When it was done, it looked just like the picture. From far away, that is. Up close it looked kind of weird, and some of my friends made fun of it, until they heard me play it. Fortunately, the ridicule part did not discourage me from future relationship with guitars.

A Little Espionage Never
Hurt Anyone

When I moved to Los Angeles, I already had a Stratocaster-shaped guitar, also handmade, this time with the right materials and components. I could not play an off-the-shelf guitars because I found them to have too many limitations for me. I still felt that my knowledge of the subjects had many gaps, so I went to work for a local guitar maker. That’s where I learned, that power tools were our friends, and “handmade” had quite a wide range of meaning.

The Infamous Grapes

So, having learned a few tricks, I was making guitars, which still didn’t have a name. I even went on tour with one of them, and that’s where the history of UVA Instruments begins officially. When all the band members were introduced by city and country of origin, I was always the one to get dumbfounded looks from the audience, since no one knew where Chile was. However, in March 1989 two imported Chilean grapes were found to be tainted with cyanide in Philadelphia cargo. USA banned the whole Chilean export of grapes for that year, and one of a sudden, everybody knew what Chile was. Ironically, it took just two grapes to put my country on the map, so I could not help it, but immortalize them by residing them on top of our UVA logo, which, by the way, means, “grape” in Spanish.