2018 Dominik Wurth SP/IN

This 2018 Dominik Wurth is a classical guitar with a spruce top and Indian rosewood back and sides, built in Germany, with bracing that borrows from Santos Hernández.

Perhaps His Most Lively Spruce Top Yet

This is a great spruce-top guitar from Dominik Wurth - perhaps his most lively and powerful yet. Of his work, he cites Antonio de Torres as his greatest influence, and the first guitars he built for us were on the basic Torres plan - seven fan struts in a domed top and a tunneled lower cross bar (below the soundhole) through which the two outer struts run. Other early influences include Daniel Friederich and Antonio Marín Montero. In recent years his style has become more personal, as a result of studying the instruments of other great makers of the past - indeed Dominik came to GSI shortly after we acquired the Cleveland collection, so that he could assess and evaluate a large number of fine instruments all at once.

Santos Hernández Bracing, in Dominik's Words

For this particular guitar, Dominik says the following:

"This has a little different bracing than my regular guitars, using some aspects of a Santos Hernandez bracing. Very nice guitar. A customer trying it out mentioned that it had a very Spanish sound. Very special on this guitar is the color of the top, it appears to have an 'old-wood-look'."

Sound

Overall, a lighter-built guitar which achieves a fine compromise between a modern guitar and the old Spanish masters. To us, this guitar is ultra-responsive in all registers and has a big, very robust sound all around. It plays easy, has immediate attack with a lively, full sound behind it and is just overall a joy to play. Fantastic instrument in every regard.

Dominik Wurth: From the Black Forest to Granada

Dominik Wurth was born in 1982 in Ettenheim, near Freiburg, Germany, and spent his childhood in a small rural village at the foot of the Black Forest. He discovered the guitar in his early twenties, and soon wanted a better instrument than his beginner guitar - so he decided to build one. In those early years he learned with the aid of books and from Sascha Nowak of Freiburg, who taught him the traditional techniques of guitar making. In 2007 he enrolled at Zwickau University (Faculty of Applied Arts, Schneeberg), the world's only university offering the study of stringed-instrument making, graduating in 2012; along the way he also earned the German master title for plucked-instrument making.

A Gitarrenbaumeister in Bad Krozingen

Dominik then spent several years in the south of Spain, in a small village in the Alpujarras near Granada, where he interned with Andrés D. Marvi and then opened his own shop. He later moved back to Germany, where he builds guitars full time - today in Bad Krozingen, just south of Freiburg. GSI is his US dealer.