AUDEN GUITARS

Rewind to last year’s Gear Of The Year results and you’ll remember that the winner of the acoustic section was the Auden Austin 12-string, a guitar that knocked our collective socks off. From that moment, we were determined to tell the Auden story in these pages and so we hit the high road and sat down with the director, Doug Sparkes. With a range of guitars that are part-built in a dedicated China-based facility and finished here in the UK, the tale of how the company came to be sounds rather like the beginning of a Graham Greene novel…

“I was in Shanghai for a weekend and I was just in the process of selling a business and wasn’t sure what I was going to do next,” Doug says. “I’d finished one meeting on a Thursday, I didn’t have my next meeting until the Tuesday, I didn’t know anybody, didn’t know Shanghai that well and thought, ‘What am I going go do?’ I