Roland Oetter

Roland Oetter (born December 2, 1949 in Bayreuth , † May 29, 1985 in Nuremberg ) was a German guitar maker .

Life

12-string guitar by Oetter from 1977, guitar number 10

Roland Oetter grew up in Bayreuth. The grandfather and the maternal uncle were guitar makers in Markneukirchen , one of the main towns in the so-called Musikwinkel , where he spent the summer holidays in his youth and got to know the instrument making workshops of his relatives. After training as a wholesale merchant, he first went freelance as a photographer. In addition, he designed guitars in the early 1970s, initially primarily ceiling bracing based on existing models that he had built at the Hoyer company in Erlangen . Together with an employee of Hoyer, he set up a guitar making workshop in Nuremberg in 1976, which he later ran alone. Since the quality of the wood offered on the market did not seem sufficient to him, he began to import Rio rosewood from Brazil himself . In the vicinity of Bayreuth he and his brother opened a sawmill for the imported and other suitable woods, from which the "North Bavarian Tonholzvertrieb" developed. Oetter and his partner also traded guitars made in Spain; the company was continued after his death (company "Sonidos"). Around 1980 he increasingly sold guitars from his own production to well-known guitarists such as Werner Lämmerhirt , Peter Ratzenbeck , Knut Kiesewetter , Tony Sheridan and Peter Finger . Joan Baez ordered a guitar as a test, but it was no longer built. In total, Oetter built around 50 acoustic guitars for steel strings (or folk and western guitars) as well as a few classical and electric guitars . Shortly after moving to the Nuremberg district of Höfles , where the workshop and sawmill were also to be relocated, Oetter had a fatal accident in a traffic accident.

Peter Finger dedicated the pieces Unforgettable   and Just Another Day in May to Oetter   (on CD Dream Dancer , 2004, Acoustic Music Records ); Werner Lämmerhirt and Peter Ratzenbeck wrote Oetter's Blues while he was still alive   (on the LP White Spots, 1978, Stockfisch Records).

literature

• Peter Finger: Unforgettable . In: Acoustic Guitar , 5/08. Verlag Acoustic Music, Osnabrück 2008, ISSN  0946-9397 . Pp. 62-64.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Peter Finger: Unforgettable . In: Acoustic Guitar 5/08. Verlag Acoustik Music, Osnabrück 2008, ISSN  0946-9397 . Pp. 62-64; Matthias H. Werner: Great guitarists . In: Morgenweb of December 21, 2012.
2. ↑ Sylvia Anslinger: Six strings full of tuning In: Augsburger Allgemeine from April 5, 2009.
3. ↑ Burkhardt van Hees: The sound painter Peter Ratzenbeck ( Memento of the original from April 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Akustik issue 98/03.