2005 Fritz Ober SP/CSAR

This 2005 Fritz Ober is a spruce and CSA rosewood classical guitar from Munich, Germany, heard in several performance videos, with no damage or repairs.

Rosewood with Hues of Sapwood

This particular instrument features beautiful aesthetics, including the rosette and purfling details. Materials are all first-quality – incredibly gorgeous rosewood for the back, sides and head veneer, with subtle hues of sapwood. The tuning machines are Reischl with black horn buttons.

Woody, Deep and Complex

Playability is excellent, and the sound is clear, focused and perfectly balanced. It is superb – excellent clarity and power, with a very woody, deep natural tone and a complex, harmonically rich texture that gives it a very intriguing, mysterious quality. The looseness, transparency, balance and inner chordal harmony make this guitar sound much more like an instrument that has been aging for 50–60 years. Although it has been played in beautifully over the course of its life, it has no damage and no repairs, only some normal aesthetic wear in the finish from regular use. Overall, a top-level concert and recording instrument for the discriminating performer.

Orfeo Magazine No. 4: Hauser III, Blöchinger and Ober

Fritz Ober (1955–2020): From Rosenheim to Munich

Fritz Ober was born in 1955 in Rosenheim, Germany, and spent his youth in the small village of Übersee am Chiemsee, where he learned to play the guitar and discovered an early love for woodworking. He built his first guitars mainly for himself, learning largely from books, then served a two-year apprenticeship with Helmut Buchsteiner – at the time the only known luthier in Upper Bavaria besides Hermann Hauser II – before opening his own workshop in Munich.

Old-World Methods and the Great Masters

In Munich he found surprising demand for pre-Torres instruments such as Panormo-style guitars and Renaissance lutes. Through Robert Lundberg, a leading expert on historical stringed instruments, he learned the methods of the old masters: working without machinery or sandpaper, with natural hide glues and resins, and with hand-split spruce – he even sought out his own trees in the nearby Alps. Soon he was restoring some of the most important guitars in Europe's great collections, by Torres, Hauser I, Santos Hernández, Manuel Ramírez, Esteso, Simplicio, Bouchet, Friederich and Fleta, among others.

The Torres/Hauser I Tradition

What he learned from these masters shaped his own style, and for the rest of his career Fritz built almost exclusively in the Torres/Hauser I tradition, aiming, in his words, to "create the deep and profound singing qualities of the Spanish tradition (Torres), combined with the harmonic clarity, evenness and transparency of Hauser I." Working alone, he made only 10–12 instruments a year, and his players included the Romeros, Wulfin Lieske, Jürgen Ruck, Earl Klugh, John Ingwerson, Doug Rubio and Andy Summers. GSI was Fritz Ober's exclusive US dealer during his lifetime.