One of the factors that limited the enduring value of the old Hispavox recordings stemmed from the quality of instruments available at the time. Fresno and de Zayas played vihuelas that were handsome but heavy. Built using the principles of modern guitar making and strung at a much higher tension, they were difficult to play and both artists achieved astonishingly good results under the circumstances. This experience was part of the process of the evolution of early music performance, and while luthiers gradually learned that earlier makers knew exactly how to make instruments that were ideal for their purpose, the situation of the vihuela was limited by the lack of historical models to copy. At the time, the Jacquemart André vihuela was still the only known original, but it is a large, unusual instrument and not really a suitable prototype for modern copies. Since then, two further instruments have been rediscovered: one in Quito, Ecuador, identified in 1976 by the Chilean guitarist and vihuelist Oscar Ohlsen; the other owned by the Musée de la Musique, Paris, and brought to public attention in 1998 by museum curator Joël Dugot. These recent discoveries give valuable new insights, but still do not provide makers with an ideal model. Contemporary makers draw on a variety of sources. They are guided by experiment and intuition, and informed by research. Many ideas are inspired by images of vihuelas preserved in original paintings and prints, although these do not resolve many fundamental questions of construction. Makers have thus turned to sixteenth century lutes as well as guitars of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that appear to maintain some of the fundamental construction principles developed in the sixteenth. Information resulting from musicological research furnishes further details. Much has been deduced, for example, from descriptions of instruments in inventories of deceased estates. They inform us not only about the owners of vihuelas, but also of their appearance, size and value. The most valuable instruments were made from rosewood or ebony, common local timbers such as walnut were used for cheaper vihuelas, soundboards were frequently decorated in the way we see in illustrations, and instruments were made in a variety of sizes. In the last quarter of the sixteenth-century, new innovations begin to appear such as instruments with curved rather than flat backs, and there was a new fashion for sound-hole decorations in the style customarily associated with later guitars, using multiple layers of parchment to create lazos hondos. Recently, François Reynaud located and published the 1575 inventory of the workshop of Toledo violero Mateo de Arratia that gives us a list of his tools and the partially completed instruments in his workshop and allows us to understand some of the techniques and processes used by early violeros. Interpreting the available information in individual ways, contemporary vihuela makers have learned to build light instruments with a string tension only one third of that of the modern guitar, but which produce a strong, rich tone. They use a very simple form of internal construction, and respond ideally to the essentially linear polyphony of sixteenth century music. Since the 1980s several makers have been making outstanding instruments that approximate the style of original vihuelas as closely as current knowledge permits.