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About Preston Thompson Guitars

Preston Thompson Guitars build handmade flattops in Sisters, Oregon — the shop Preston Thompson founded after decades studying pre-war Martin construction. Preston came up under Charles Fox at his Vermont guitar school in the 1970s and then through Randy Wood's Old Time Pickin' Parlor in Nashville, but his defining education was the years he spent with bluegrass great Charles Sawtelle measuring his collection of pre-war Martin dreadnoughts — measurements that still drive the shop's bracing patterns and top graduations today. The instruments were chosen as winner's prize at the National Flatpicking Championships three years running, and players including Eric Bibb and Sawtelle himself put them on records. Preston passed away in 2019, and the team he had spent years training continued the work in the same Sisters shop using the same methods and the same hands. …

About The Fellowship of Acoustics

The Fellowship of Acoustics (TFOA) is a destination acoustic shop in Dedemsvaart, eastern Netherlands, run by Rudi Bults and his family since 2001 — what started as a barn-side business has grown into one of Europe's largest specialty guitar shops, housed since 2015 in a former town hall ("Villa Dina") that holds upwards of a thousand guitars. From the start, TFOA bet on selling worldwide in English from a small Dutch town, focused entirely on quality handmade instruments rather than mass-market volume. The villa houses retail, a luthier workshop with their "Gold Standard" setup and a PLEK machine for precision fret work, plus a small theatre and a music school under the same roof. Their boutique acoustic shelves run deep on Bourgeois, Collings, Santa Cruz, Lowden, Furch, Goodall, and Huss & Dalton, alongside a strong vintage and consigned catalog.

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