Dowina Guitars – pronounced Davina Guitars – is a small guitar shop based in Bratislava, Slovakia. What started as a violin workshop, overlooking the castle of Devin, evolved into a concept shop for building unique guitars that are inspired by the violin maker’s expertise, experience, and intuition. What almost sounds like a story out of an Eastern European fairy tale, the Dowina operation continued to grow, and in 2010 moved to a larger property in Devinska Nova Ves, where their production center, warehouse, custom shop and administration are located.

Today, Dowina Guitars is known for hand-crafting acoustic guitars that are known for their impressive price to quality ratio, sound quality, and playability. They exclusively use premium tonewoods for their acoustic guitars. This, paired with their exceptional build quality and craftsmanship would have you believe that their guitars would cost a fortune; but they don’t. Quite the opposite, in fact. Dowina Guitars are some of the best priced instruments we have come across at Kauffmann’s Guitar Store, especially when you consider that they feel great, sound great, and are built exclusively in Europe.

You would think that with a price like that, their building process has to be automated or simplified to some degree. But in fact, Dowina Guitars can hold their own compared to some of the top guitar brands out there when it comes to their building process. The team at Dowina uses premium tonewoods which are specially hand selected for every guitar they build. This, in other words, means that a block of wood is only selected if it passes the resonance test, conducted by a master luthier. Each piece of potential tonewood is knocked, tapped, and inspected closely before it goes into production, as Dowina Guitars want to make sure only the best woods are used for their instruments. It doesn’t stop there though. Before the wood they use for their guitars even makes it into their workshop, it goes through a strategic sourcing criteria. Spruce, for example, is known to grow in many different places around the world, each differing slightly due to their origin’s temperature, humidity, and environment. So, anytime the master builders at Dowina Guitars want to use Spruce, they will source it exclusively from the Dolomite Alps, as the Spruce that down there yields wood

with a higher density, which will therefore give their guitars more resonance and attack, when compared to using typical, German grown Spruce like many other guitar brands out there. This approach to wood selection and sourcing was used by legendary violin builders Amati and Stradivari, and if Dolomite Spruce was their secret weapon, then the master builders at Dowina Guitars are definitely on to something. So, as you can see, for Dowina Guitars, the devil is in the details, and we believe that is one of the reasons they make such beautiful instruments.

Once the wood selection for each individual guitar has been completed, the master builders will use it to construct the body shapes of the guitar. With Dowina Guitars, you will typically see several familiar body shapes, such as the famous dreadnought, grand auditorium, as well as several slightly smaller 000 style guitars. The main differentiator in the Dowina Guitars range comes down to the woods they use. These include guitars made with both Cedar and Spruce tops. For their backs and sides, Dowina Guitars typically use Mahogany, Rosewood, Sapele, and even Pau Ferro.