Making guitars is as much an art form as playing them, as guitar maker Michael O'Leary knows all too well. He talks to Arminta Wallace

'We live, eat and sleep guitars in this house," says Michael O'Leary. He's not kidding - but as it turns out, the guitar zeal of the O'Leary family has been something of a boon to the wider musical scene in Ireland. Michael and Alec O'Leary are a father-and-son team who have, between them, produced both a new way of building guitars and a new music festival, the Walton's Guitar Festival of Ireland.

It all began, as Michael O'Leary explains, with his father - another guitar fanatic. Growing up in Graiguenamanagh, on the border of Cos Carlow and Kilkenny, young Michael was fed a steady diet of flamenco and fado along with the bread from his father's bakery.

"He taught me to play, and I passed it on to Alec, one of my two sons, who took it up professionally," he says. "Being self-taught, of course, I'm a reasonably poor player and passed on all my bad traits to Alec. When he went off to study in a serious way, he changed his whole technique - and then he came back and changed my approach. So although I'm not up to his standard, or anything like it, we play together quite a bit at home."

Over the years, Michael and Alec travelled regularly to guitar festivals in the UK, where they would meet Irish guitar students and everybody would bemoan the fact that there was nothing like this back in Dublin. In 2004 Alec bit the bullet and put together a programme of concerts, workshops and seminars, and the Walton's Guitar Festival of Ireland was born. "We get some help from Walton's [the Dublin music store], but they're the best kind of sponsor - they don't interfere at all in the structure or the content of the festival, so it's entirely up to us," says Michael. In recent years, Arts Council funding has also helped put the festival on a more secure footing. It's still run on a shoestring - or maybe that should be a guitar string? - nevertheless, the O'Leary expertise guarantees a programme of impressive diversity, not to mention visiting performers of incredible virtuosity.

At about the time when O'Leary fils was incubating the idea of a guitar festival, meanwhile, O'Leary père was facing the fact that he was about to be made redundant. He had worked for what he calls "an ailing motor supplier" in Carlow for many years, and had never been particularly happy with a factory environment. He compensated by spending his leisure time pursuing more creative activities; woodwork, for one. He also took an Open University course in modern material manufacturing processes, and another in design and innovation.

"I was always keen to do something for myself, but the opportunity didn't arrive until the end of 2002," Michael explains. "Then, of course, I had to take the decision as to what to do next. Alec suggested that I should look at making guitars, but I kind of laughed it off. I thought I could never do it."

Once again, however, that father-and-son-vibe came into play. The pair travelled to Portugal in search of a new handmade guitar for Michael, and while they were there, they met a guitar maker who showed them around the workshops of Coimbra, centre of Portugal's fado tradition.

"We had made contact with guitar makers on the internet, and we were very lucky to find this old guy who brought us on a tour. I saw what was going on there, and I think that probably started to sow the seed of wanting to do something like that," Michael says.

When he left the company he was working for, he booked himself into a guitar-making course in Spain. "I worked with Jose Romanillos, who made guitars for Julian Bream. He gave me a fantastic grounding in the theories and choice of woods, which I could never have got for myself from books or anything."

Romanillos was a staunch traditionalist who believed that guitars should be made the way guitars had always been made. The Spanish method, he was certain, produced the best sound for the international guitar market. Listening to his son talk about the problems of contemporary classical guitarists, though, Michael O'Leary wasn't so sure.

"As Alec progressed through college, we were buying more expensive guitars and we became more aware of the kind of guitars that were available - and the kind that weren't," he says. "The concert classical guitar is basically a chamber instrument. The sound from it is for a small area; but most performances now are in larger venues. To get volume - to actually produce the bigger sound - puts a lot of stress on the player, and that in turn causes tonal problems. If you use amplification, of course, you lose the beautiful tones altogether.

"Some of the Australian guitar makers had changed over to what they call lattice bracing, which is quite an innovative thing where the whole structure of the sound board is changed - but unfortunately, in doing that, they lost a lot of the sweeter qualities of tone of the Spanish guitar. That was my challenge: to find some way to get volume without losing the harmonics."

Michael brought his theories in modern materials to bear on the topic, and came up with a new way of building a guitar using Kevlar, carbon fibre, balsa wood and such-like. A space-age guitar? Wouldn't his Mediterranean mentors be horrified? "Well," he says, "everyone used to wonder how Stradivarius got the quality of tone he did with his violins. For generations they suspected he had some special ingredient in the varnish. There was also a fanciful idea that he used wood salvaged from cathedrals and so on, so that the architectural grandeur was somehow captured in the instrument. Recent studies have shown that that was complete rubbish."

The truth, it seems, is that Stradivarius used untreated spruce grown high up in the Alps during his lifetime - a particularly cold period, according to scientists, when the trees grew slowly, giving the wood a particularly fine grain. The secret of good guitar making is, and always has been, in the wood, says O'Leary, who goes to Spain on a wood-buying expedition every year.

"We sort through literally tons of wood. About 1 per cent of what's for sale would be suitable for what I do." It's an expensive, time-consuming process - Michael's guitars can cost anything up to $50,000 (€37,250) - but the results have been spectacular enough to impress many top guitarists, including John Williams, who spent a day at O'Leary's workshops and invited him back to meet his own guitar maker in the UK.

O'Leary now has a healthy order book, and a waiting list of clients. "There's great satisfaction in going to a performance and seeing somebody playing your guitar," he says. "On the other hand, if I make a very good guitar, I hate to see it going out the door. I'd much prefer to keep it. "But," and he hesitates for a short, but very revealing, fraction of a second, "you can't do that."