Otto Vowinkel, 2019

Every so often a guitar comes through the shop that carries its maker's whole world with it. This 2019 concert model by Amsterdam luthier Otto Vowinkel is one of those instruments. It was built for a close friend of Otto's, and the wood choices reflect that special relationship: an absolutely stunning bearclaw spruce top paired with equally striking flamed maple back and sides.

It is also everything Vowinkel's concert guitars are known for: huge volume, physically light, incredibly easy to play, ultra responsive and very powerful, with outstanding tonal qualities, evenness of sound color across the range, and perfect intonation. And in the most literal way, it is a piece of Amsterdam. It's a guitar with a story, and a tone to match.

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Specifications

Top: Bearclaw Spruce

Back & Sides: Flamed Maple

Tuners: Sloane with snakewood buttons

Strings: D'Addario XTC45FF with normal tension nylon first string
https://ddar.io/guitar-collection

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Construction & Design

The guitar is traditionally built with 5 fan bracing, and a shellac finish applied in the traditional French polish method adds a beautiful luster to the finished instrument. Snakewood bindings, a Brazilian rosewood bridge, and Sloane tuners with snakewood buttons round out a remarkably elegant build.

We especially love how Vowinkel wove his home city into this guitar. The rosette takes its motif from the flag of Amsterdam, and the headstock is carved after the facade of his own workshop, right down to the mother of pearl dot at the peak. That dot represents the hoisting beam found atop Amsterdam's canal houses, a hook and pulley rig used to lift furniture and goods in through the tall windows, since the houses were built with staircases far too narrow and steep for anything bulky. Once you know the origins, the references are unmistakable. If you don't, they simply read as elegant detail.

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Sound & Playability

This is a genuinely loud guitar, but the volume never comes at the expense of refinement. The sound is powerful and remarkably even from string to string and register to register, with a consistency of color that few instruments achieve. Response is immediate: the guitar speaks the instant you ask it to, and the intonation is impeccable everywhere on the fingerboard.

In the hands, the instrument is physically very light and incredibly easy to play. The 650mm scale and 52.5mm nut feel comfortable and familiar, and the effortless response means the guitar rewards a light touch just as readily as it delivers when you dig in.

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About the Luthier

Otto Vowinkel began building guitars in 1984 in the attic of his Amsterdam home, working on top of an old pool table with Irving Sloane's Classical Guitar Construction as his only guide. Self taught and relentless about improvement, he refined his craft one instrument at a time, and in 1989 began a long collaboration with fellow Dutch luthier Alex van der Horst in pursuit of a shared ideal: a flexible tone, a quick response, and the quality of the sound itself as the carrier of volume.

Today Vowinkel is a renowned maker with players around the world. He builds in his workshop on the Lauriergracht in the center of Amsterdam, the city where he was raised in a family of tailors, and he remains committed to traditionally constructed instruments in which tonal quality always comes first.

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This guitar is in mint condition with no signs of wear.

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