Andreas Schluetter

Andreas Schlütter is a German jaw harp maker and traditional musician from Zella-Mehlis. In 2025, German regional press described the Schlütter family workshop as the only business in the country still making jaw harps by hand, and Andreas as Germany’s only full-time jaw harp maker.

The workshop’s history began in the early 1970s. Andreas’s father, Friedrich Schlütter, was helping to establish the local history museum when he found a box of unusually shaped metal objects among the contents of a former wholesaler. The museum could not identify them, but ethnographer Ernst Stahl recognised them as old jaw harps. The instruments were in poor condition and scarcely playable, prompting Friedrich to reproduce and gradually refine their construction. He began making jaw harps regularly in 1973.

Andreas has continued the family craft since 2000. He works in his great-grandfather’s former workshop, where sporting and hunting weapons were once made. Schlütter developed the old jaw harp form discovered in Zella-Mehlis to produce a louder and more present sound, and now makes a broad range of precisely tuned instruments by hand.

Andreas also performs with the Thüringische Spielleut ensemble, playing jaw harp, bagpipe, shawm, harmonica, Thuringian forest zither and other traditional instruments. He participates in festivals and exchanges knowledge with performers from different countries. Since 2024, he has been passing the craft on to Florian Bader, who is learning to make and tune jaw harps in the workshop.

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