In recent years, Gunther Reinhardt has spent a lot of time at timber auctions in southern Germany and Austria. 

“With the purchase of our own wood, we’ve opened up a whole new field within our company,” says Gunther Reinhardt. Until now, Reinhardt GmbH’s core business was producing instruments and offering them through its distribution network. The wood for the guitars was always sourced independently from various suppliers. 

Now, with their own wood, Reinhardt GmbH is taking a completely new approach. Gunther Reinhardt’s main goal is to offer guitars in the entry-level and mid-price segments that are made from guaranteed locally sourced wood from sustainable forestry. Until now, this has only been common in high-end guitars. “Among German luthiers, it’s long been standard practice to build guitars exclusively from local woods,” says Reinhardt. “We want to make that available across all our house brands—Baton Rouge, La Mancha, and Duke.” 

Thermal Refinement Makes Wood Usable 

rECO Series - For every sold instrument we plant a tree!

To display this video, YouTube stores data in a cookie and also processes usage data outside the EU. Further information can be found in our privacy policy.

The house brands Baton Rouge and La Mancha now feature the first production models under the shared name rECO Series. 

However, Reinhardt doesn’t want to completely abandon tropical woods—only where it makes sense. That’s primarily in areas where large quantities of wood are needed and the exceptional tonal properties of tropical woods aren’t critical. “Through thermal modification, we’re able to refine local woods so they can be used without issue to build great-sounding instruments.” Reinhardt backs this approach with scientific support from the University for Sustainable Development in Eberswalde near Berlin. Over several years, he worked with researchers to optimize the thermal refinement process for tonewoods so it could be used in regular production. 

Processing their own wood is no easy task. “We’ve learned a lot over the past few years—from selecting the right tonewood to how it should be cut and how best to treat it thermally so it can be used for specific guitar parts,” says Reinhardt. The biggest challenge, however, was getting manufacturers to learn how to work with the treated wood. “Thermal treatment makes the wood very dry and brittle. Especially when bending the sides, we broke a ton of them at first. Our manufacturers had to adjust their processes accordingly. That took time.”