2020 Dietmar Heubner SP/AR

This 2020 Dietmar Heubner is a spruce and African rosewood classical guitar from Berlin – the first guitar he built for GSI.

Our First Heubner

This guitar, our first from Dietmar, has an abundance of the qualities he aims for: a wide dynamic range, great balance, tonal color and maximal projection. A rosewood veneer on both the front and back of the headstock frames the matching buttons on the Scheller tuners perfectly, and the French polish has a mirror-like quality that gives the wood beneath a silky, rich texture. The label is dated February 2020.

Sound

Overall an extremely impressive instrument for quality of build, quality and quantity of sound and overall design. Raphaël Feuillâtre plays Rameau’s “Les Sauvages” on it in the video above.

See photos of this guitar taken during construction on our blog.

Dietmar Heubner: From Stuttgart to Berlin

Like so many of the world’s top luthiers of the past, German luthier Dietmar Heubner started out his woodworking career as a cabinet maker in Stuttgart in the 1980s but quickly turned to the construction of classical guitars. After nearly 30 years of working in southern Germany, Dietmar moved his workshop to Berlin in the summer of 2018, where he joined a small community of luthiers who call themselves the “Berlin Luthiers” – colleagues and friends who find their collective a fertile ground for mutual inspiration and the genuine exchange of experience. GSI is his exclusive representative in the USA.

Traditional Guitars with a Bold, Modern Sound

Dietmar focuses on building traditional guitars with a bold, modern sound that allows musicians to create their own individual tone. His emphasis is on a wide dynamic range, great balance, an abundance of tonal colors and maximal projection, and he has an understated yet extremely elegant and precise aesthetic: a rosette of an inner mosaic of tiny pieces of wood between bands of purfling, with two outer mosaics of connected diamonds, and a French polish of the highest quality.