2019 Fritz Ober SP/CSAR

This 2019 Fritz Ober is a spruce and CSA rosewood classical guitar built in Munich, Germany, during the final years of Fritz's career.

Bearclaw Spruce and Aged CSA Rosewood

Fritz's workmanship and choice of materials are on full display here, with lovely rosette and purfling details. The back and sides are cut from colorful, aged CSA rosewood of the very first quality, matched to a dark spruce top full of bearclaw figure. The Scheller tuners have rosewood buttons that match the head veneer and the back and sides.

Sound and Playability

It plays beautifully, and the sound is clear, focused and perfectly balanced, with plenty of power and a woody, deep, natural tone. To our ears no one came closer than Fritz to the loose, warm sound of the early "Spanish-style" Hauser I guitars: a complex, harmonically rich voice with an intriguing, almost mysterious quality, and enough looseness, transparency and inner chordal harmony to suggest a guitar that has been aging for 50–60 years. Previously owned, it showed almost no signs of use – 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.