Markus Held was born in Heidenheim in 1973 and had his first contact with the classical guitar at the age of seven. He now lives in southern Germany near the Swiss border between Freiburg and Basel, in Müllheim-Vögisheim, where his workshop is located in the same building as his home.
Since 2006 he has been building traditional Spanish-style concert and flamenco guitars. Alongside his profession as an engineer, his education included the intensive study of historical masters and their instruments. Drawing on this background and his understanding of mechanics and dynamics, he creates guitars of high craftsmanship and with a distinctive tonal character.
The Craft
Markus Held works in the tradition of the Spanish classical guitar tradition — a tradition that prizes hand work, careful wood selection, and the pursuit of tonal balance across the instrument's full range. Classical guitar construction at this level requires deep knowledge of wood acoustics, the ability to read and shape individual pieces of timber rather than treating them as interchangeable, and a patience that cannot be hurried. A concert guitar typically demands several hundred hours of work from raw materials to the finished instrument.
