There is a particular kind of guitar that never gets a magazine cover, never gets slung over a shoulder at Glastonbury, and never gets name-checked in a Rig Rundown — and yet it is the one that turns up, over and over, in the hands of working musicians who actually had to pay for their instruments. The Furch Blue Plus D-CM is that guitar. All-solid Western red cedar over all-solid African mahogany. A full-size dreadnought. A carbon-reinforced neck joint that adjusts its own action while you sleep. Built in a mill town in South Moravia by a company that started in a garage under a communist government and now turns out thousands of guitars a year without a single one leaving the country as a laminate.
And here is the thing nobody at Furch has said out loud: the company’s own website now describes it as a discontinued model. Not on a press release. Not in a dealer bulletin. In the meta description of its own product page, updated 5 March 2026, on both the international and North American sites: “Discontinued model: The Blue Plus CM a is made from Western red cedar and African mahogany.” Meanwhile the guitar is still sitting on the live Blue Series index page with a price next to it — €1,518 in Europe, $1,724 in the States. Two Furch pages, two different stories, same week.
That contradiction is the single most useful thing a buyer can know about this guitar in 2026, and we will come back to it. But first, the instrument itself deserves a proper hearing, because it is a genuinely excellent dreadnought that happens to have been born into the least glamorous slot in a very good catalogue.
The Furch Story: A Garage, a Regime, and a Mill in Velké Němčice
Furch guitars begin the way a lot of the best European instrument companies begin — with someone who could not buy what he wanted and decided to build it instead. František Furch started making instruments in the 1970s in Czechoslovakia, at a time when a Martin dreadnought was not something you ordered, it was something you heard about. The early instruments were banjos and flat-tops built for players who had no other route to a decent acoustic. What began as a workaround became a workshop, the workshop became a company, and after the Velvet Revolution the company became an exporter.
Today the operation is run from Velké Němčice, south of Brno, in a converted mill, and the scale is no longer boutique — Furch builds on the order of nine thousand guitars a year. What is unusual is that scale has not been used to push the entry level downwards. There is no plywood Furch. Every guitar in every colour series is all-solid wood, which is a fundamentally different business decision from the one most of Furch’s price competitors made.
Decoding the Name: Blue, Plus, D, and CM
Furch renamed its entire range in 2018, swapping an alphanumeric system (D23-CR, G23-CC CUT, OM34-SR) for a colour hierarchy. Once you have the key, the current names read like a spec sheet:
- Blue — the series. Furch’s ranges run Violet, Blue, Green, Yellow, Red, ascending in tonewood grade and appointment. Blue is the second rung, and the first rung where the full modern feature set arrives.
- Plus — within a series, “Plus” denotes the upgraded cosmetic and finish package. On the Blue Plus, that means a Full-Pore High-Gloss Finish on the soundboard instead of the matte Open-Pore top used on the standard Blue, plus faux tortoise binding, a black-and-white purfling line, a double-ring black walnut rosette and a transparent anti-scratch pickguard.
- D — Dreadnought. The full-depth, square-shouldered body shape that has dominated steel-string guitar since 1916. Its cutaway sibling is Dc.
- C — Cedar soundboard (Western red cedar).
- M — Mahogany back and sides (African mahogany).
So “Blue Plus D-CM” resolves to: second-tier series, gloss-top appointment package, dreadnought body, cedar top, mahogany back and sides. Furch itself files the whole family under the umbrella name Blue Plus CM a — the trailing “a” designating the acoustic (non-electronics) version — with the body shape selected at order time.
Specifications
Cedar Over Mahogany: What This Combination Actually Does
Most dreadnoughts you have heard are spruce over rosewood or spruce over mahogany. Cedar over mahogany is a deliberately different proposition, and understanding why explains who this guitar is for.
Western red cedar is a softer, lighter, less stiff soundboard timber than Sitka spruce. It converts a light touch into volume more readily — the guitar “opens up” at a lower input energy — and it arrives at its mature voice almost immediately rather than taking a decade of playing to loosen. The trade is headroom: hammer a cedar top with a heavy flatpick and it compresses rather than continuing to get louder. The tonal signature is warm, dark, immediate, with a slightly rounded attack and a rich midrange.
African mahogany back and sides push in the opposite direction from rosewood. Rosewood adds a deep, complex, reverberant low end and glassy overtones; mahogany is drier, more focused, more fundamental-forward, with a strong midrange and a fast decay. On a big dreadnought box, that dryness is a feature — it keeps the low end from turning to mud.
Put together on a dreadnought, cedar and mahogany produce something that Furch’s own copy describes as “a beautiful musical sound across the entire tonal range with slightly pronounced lows.” In practice: a fingerstyle-friendly dreadnought. That is close to a contradiction in terms in most catalogues. The dreadnought shape gives you the air volume and the bass; the cedar gives you the response at low picking force; the mahogany keeps the whole thing articulate. If you are a fingerpicker who has always wanted a dreadnought’s authority but has been driven away by how much right-hand work a spruce dread demands before it wakes up, this specific combination is the answer to that specific problem.
What it is not is a bluegrass cannon. If your job is to cut through a mandolin, a fiddle and a banjo with a heavy pick, buy spruce. Furch will happily sell you the Blue Plus SW a — Sitka spruce over black walnut, €1,649 — which is engineered for exactly that.
The CNR System® Active: The Real Reason to Buy a Furch
Every Furch built today, from the Blue upwards, uses the CNR System® Active neck joint, and it is the single most consequential piece of engineering on this guitar. Three things are happening at once:
Carbon reinforcement. The dual-action truss rod is encased in a rigid carbon structure rather than sitting loose in a channel. That stiffens the neck against seasonal movement before the truss rod ever has to be turned.
Automatic string action regulation. This is the unusual part. A solid-wood expansion element in the joint responds to changes in humidity by adjusting the neck angle, counteracting the seasonal rise and fall of the action that every wooden guitar suffers. Furch’s stated goal is to minimise the need for the neck resets that eventually come due on conventionally built flat-tops as the top bellies and the neck rotates forward over decades.
Adjustability without a luthier. The joint is designed so that setup changes are quick and reversible rather than a shop visit.
Whether it fully eliminates neck resets is a claim only time can settle — the system in its Active form is not yet old enough for a definitive verdict. What is verifiable is that the guitar is markedly less sensitive to a change of season than a comparably priced traditionally built dreadnought, and that matters enormously if you live somewhere with real winters, or if you gig and your guitar spends its life going between a cold van and a hot room.
Individual Soundboard Voicing
Furch’s other headline process is individual soundboard voicing. Rather than bracing every top to a fixed dimension, each soundboard is measured and its bracing adjusted to bring that particular piece of wood to a target response. It is what a good small-shop luthier does by tapping and shaving, industrialised. The stated aim is consistency — that two Blue Plus D-CMs off the same line should sound like each other, and both should sound like the guitar Furch intended.
This is also the honest counterweight to the grade-AA tonewood spec. AA is a middle grade — visually less spectacular than the AAA tops on the Yellow and Red series, but the voicing process means the structural performance of the top is set by measurement, not by cosmetic grading. You are paying less for how the wood looks, not for how it has been worked.
Famous Players: The Honest Answer
No famous guitarist is documented playing a Furch Blue Plus D-CM. Not on Furch’s own artist roster, not in any Rig Rundown, not in any interview we could verify. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either guessing or reading a retailer’s copy.
That is not a knock on the guitar, and the reasons are structural and worth spelling out.
Furch does have a real, published artist roster, and it contains genuinely significant names: Al Di Meola, Suzanne Vega, Per Gessle of Roxette, Glen Hansard of The Frames, David Knopfler (founding Dire Straits guitarist, and brother of Mark Knopfler), Gerry Leonard of David Bowie’s touring band, and the Grammy- and Emmy-winning producer Kipper, alongside dozens of Czech, Slovak, Scandinavian and North American players.
But the page they appear on carries a last-modified date of 17 March 2020, and — this is the giveaway — where it names specific instruments, it names them in the pre-2018 code system that Furch abandoned eight years ago. Damian Lynn is listed on a G23-CR CUT. Aneta Langerová on a D23-CR. Jamie Winchester on a G42-CR Cut and an OM34-SR. Donovan Raitt on a G23-CC CUT. Only two entries on the entire page use post-rename nomenclature: Olda Krejčoves on a Yellow Plus G-CR, and Mirai on a Rainbow OM-DB.
In other words, the roster is a CMS artefact. It was populated before the Colour Series existed and never systematically re-tagged. The absence of any Blue Plus from it is not evidence that no professional plays one — it is evidence that the page stopped being maintained around the time the model naming changed. We flagged exactly this pattern when covering the Furch Yellow Deluxe Gc-CR, and it holds here identically.
There is a second, more mundane reason a Blue Plus D-CM will not turn up on a stage photo: it ships with no pickup. Electronics are a paid option — LR Baggs EAS-VTC or Stagepro Element at €194 / $221, Anthem or Stagepro Anthem at €371 / $421, HiFi at €267 / $303, HiFi Duet at €534 / $607. A guitar sold without amplification, in a series positioned below the artist-relations tier, is by design a guitar that lives in living rooms, studios and small rooms rather than on festival stages. Furch’s endorsement effort points at the Yellow and Red series; the Blue is where the company competes on value.
What you can honestly say is this: the players on Furch’s roster who are documented on cedar-and-mahogany instruments — Michal Němec on a C21-CM, Věra Martinová and Jonathan Lawson of The Railers on LJ10-CMs, Magda Piskorczyk on a B61-CM — were choosing the same tonal recipe this guitar is built around, in parlour, travel and bass form. The combination has a professional constituency. This particular dreadnought just is not the instrument any of them was handed.
Tone Recipes and Setup
1. The singer-songwriter chair. Standard tuning, medium-light strings, fingers or a thin 0.60 mm pick. Pick just forward of the soundhole edge. Cedar rewards restraint — play at about 60% of the force you would use on a spruce dread and the guitar gives you the other 40% back as bloom. This is the guitar’s home setting and the one it was voiced for.
2. DADGAD and open tunings. The 650 mm scale with a 45 mm nut is genuinely comfortable in altered tunings, and the mahogany back keeps drone strings from smearing. Drop to DADGAD, capo at the second fret, and let the low D ring — the “slightly pronounced lows” Furch describes become a sustained pedal tone rather than a boom. Consider the 48 mm nut option if open tunings and thumb-independent fingerstyle are your main diet.
3. Recording, close-miked. Small-diaphragm condenser at the 12th fret, 20–25 cm out, angled slightly toward the soundhole. Cedar’s fast attack and mahogany’s fast decay make this an unusually easy guitar to fit into a dense mix — it takes up less spectral room than a rosewood dread and needs far less corrective EQ around 200–300 Hz. If you add a second mic over the shoulder for stereo, keep it distant and check phase.
4. Flatpicked rhythm, controlled. If you want strummed rhythm from this guitar, go medium gauge (13–56), move your strumming hand back toward the bridge, and accept a ceiling on volume. You will get a beautifully thick, compressed rhythm bed — the kind that sits under a vocal instead of fighting it. What you will not get is a bluegrass rhythm cannon, and pushing for one just makes the top compress into mush.
5. Amplified, with the Anthem option. If you order electronics, the LR Baggs Anthem is the one worth the money on a cedar top: its internal microphone captures the top’s air and immediacy, which is precisely the quality a bare undersaddle piezo destroys on a cedar guitar. Blend toward the mic, roll the piezo in only as much as you need for feedback resistance and pick definition.
How It Compares
Versus the standard Furch Blue CM a (€1,435). Same tonewoods, same grade, same CNR System® Active, same voicing. The €83 difference buys the Full-Pore High-Gloss top, the faux tortoise binding, the walnut rosette and the transparent pickguard. Tonally you are choosing between a gloss top and a matte one — a real but small difference, generally favouring the matte finish for raw resonance and the gloss for projection and durability. This is a cosmetics-and-finish decision, not a tone decision, and it is fair to say the plain Blue is the value play.
Versus the Furch Blue Deluxe CM a 2026 (€1,879). Adds the ergonomic Bevel Duo armrest and the Booster Soundport. If you play seated for hours, the bevel is genuinely worth the money.
Versus the Furch Blue Performance CM a 2026 (€2,013). The Deluxe plus a factory-fitted LR Baggs Stagepro Element. Do the arithmetic before you decide: a Blue Plus with an aftermarket Stagepro comes in meaningfully cheaper, though without the bevel and soundport.
Versus the Furch Yellow Deluxe Gc-CR. A different guitar entirely, at more than double the price — cedar over Indian rosewood, higher tonewood grades, a Grand Auditorium body with a cutaway. The Yellow is the fingerstyle-first instrument with rosewood complexity; the Blue Plus D-CM is the drier, more direct, bigger-bodied one at less than half the outlay.
Versus the Maton SRS808. Australia’s all-solid small-body answer, and an interesting philosophical opposite: the Maton is a small body engineered to sound big, this is a big body engineered to be responsive. The Maton arrives with AP5 Pro electronics standard; the Furch arrives with none. If you gig plugged in, that changes the real-world price comparison considerably.
Versus the Ovation Celebrity Elite CE44. A stage-first instrument with a Lyrachord bowl and factory electronics at a third of the price, against an acoustic-first all-solid wood instrument. They barely overlap in purpose. Buy the Ovation if the guitar’s job is to be plugged in and survive; buy the Furch if the guitar’s job is to sound like a guitar in a room.
Versus a Martin D-15M or Guild D-20. The obvious all-solid mahogany-bodied dreadnought rivals at similar money, both with spruce or mahogany tops rather than cedar, both traditionally built. The Furch counters with the CNR System® Active, the individual voicing process, ebony rather than rosewood appointments, and three nut widths to choose from. The Americans counter with resale value and a name your bandmates recognise. That is a genuine trade-off, not a rhetorical one.
Buying Guide: Read the Discontinuation Signal
Here is where the March 2026 page update matters. Furch’s own product pages for the Blue Plus CM a — both the international and the North American versions — carry meta descriptions beginning “Discontinued model.” Yet the model has not been moved to Furch’s /discontinued-models/ directory the way the Blue MM a, the Blue Deluxe CM a (pre-2026), the Blue Deluxe SW a (pre-2026) and both pre-2026 Blue Performance models have been. It is still listed and priced on the live Blue Series index.
There is a second tell on the same page. The spec table lists six available body shapes — D, Dc, G, Gc, OM, OMc — but the page’s own “Available body shapes” selector widget offers only Dc, the dreadnought cutaway. If that widget reflects current orderable stock rather than historical range, the plain non-cutaway D may already be gone from the order book.
Practical guidance:
- If you want a new one, move now and confirm the body shape in writing. Ask your dealer specifically whether a non-cutaway D is still orderable, and get an answer from Furch rather than from a website that is contradicting itself.
- Expect run-out pricing. Models in this state typically see dealer discounting before they vanish. A Blue Plus D-CM bought at a run-out price is one of the strongest value propositions in all-solid dreadnoughts.
- Do not panic about parts or service. Discontinuation of a model does not affect the CNR System® Active, which is current across the entire Furch range and will be supported for the foreseeable future.
- Choose the nut width deliberately. 45 mm is standard, 43 mm suits players coming from electrics or with smaller hands, 48 mm suits fingerstyle and altered tunings. This is a build-time choice, not a later modification.
- Budget for a case. The included gigbag is a good one, but Furch’s own North American page recommends a rigid Hiscox ABS case for transport — a recommendation that, oddly, appears on the US page but not the international one. If you are gigging, take the advice regardless of which page you read.
- Decide on electronics before you order. Factory-fitted LR Baggs installation is cleaner and, at Furch’s quoted option prices, competitive with aftermarket fitting.
Living With It
Cedar marks more easily than spruce. It is a softer wood. The transparent pickguard protects the strum zone, but a dropped pick or a belt buckle will leave a mark that would only have burnished a spruce top. This is the price of cedar’s responsiveness and it is not a defect.
Humidity still matters, but less. The CNR System® Active handles neck angle; it does not handle the soundboard. Keep the guitar between roughly 45% and 55% relative humidity and use a case humidifier in winter. What you should notice, compared with a conventional dreadnought, is that the action stays where you left it across the seasons.
The Open-Pore finish is honest and low-maintenance. Matte back, sides and neck do not show fingerprints and do not need polishing. The gloss top does. A dry microfibre cloth is the whole maintenance routine.
Ebony everywhere means less fuss. Ebony fretboard, bridge, pins and headstock overlay — harder-wearing than rosewood and unaffected by the CITES restrictions that complicate travel with rosewood-bodied instruments. For a touring player, an all-mahogany-and-ebony guitar is a border-crossing simplification worth having.
Strings. The factory fit is D’Addario XS coated phosphor bronze in 12–53. Coated strings suit a cedar top well, since cedar’s warmth means you lose little of the top-end zing that coatings shave off. Going up to 13s adds low-end authority and drive at the cost of some responsiveness; going down to 11s makes it a very easy-playing fingerstyle guitar with a lighter bottom.
FAQ
Is the Furch Blue Plus D-CM discontinued?
Furch’s own product pages, updated 5 March 2026 on both the international and North American sites, describe it as a discontinued model in their meta descriptions. However, it remains listed and priced on the live Blue Series index at €1,518 / $1,724, and has not been moved to Furch’s discontinued-models directory the way several other Blue Series instruments have. Treat it as a run-out model: still buyable, probably not for long, and worth confirming availability with a dealer before you set your heart on a specific body shape.
Is the whole guitar solid wood?
Yes. Solid Western red cedar top, solid African mahogany back and sides, both grade AA. Furch does not build laminate instruments in any series.
What does the CNR System® Active actually do?
It is a neck joint containing a carbon-encased dual-action truss rod plus a solid-wood expansion element that automatically adjusts the neck angle in response to humidity changes, keeping string action stable across seasons. Furch’s stated goal is to minimise the need for neck resets over the guitar’s life. It also makes setup adjustments quick and reversible.
Is a cedar top less durable than spruce?
Cedar is softer and dents more easily, so it shows playing wear sooner. Structurally, a properly braced and voiced cedar top is entirely durable — cedar has been the standard classical guitar soundboard timber for decades. The transparent pickguard covers the area most at risk.
Which famous guitarists play a Furch Blue Plus D-CM?
None that can be verified. Furch’s artist roster is real and includes Al Di Meola, Suzanne Vega, Per Gessle, Glen Hansard, David Knopfler, Gerry Leonard and Kipper, but the page was last updated in March 2020 and still lists instruments using the pre-2018 model codes Furch abandoned. No Blue Plus appears anywhere on it. The model also ships without electronics, which independently explains its absence from touring rigs.
Does it come with a pickup?
No. The “a” in Blue Plus CM a denotes the acoustic version. LR Baggs systems are available as paid factory options ranging from the EAS-VTC and Stagepro Element at €194 / $221 up to the HiFi Duet at €534 / $607.
What is the difference between the Blue and the Blue Plus?
Tonewoods, grade, bracing, voicing and the neck system are identical. The Plus adds a Full-Pore High-Gloss soundboard finish in place of the matte Open-Pore top, faux tortoise binding, black-and-white purfling, a double-ring black walnut rosette and a transparent pickguard, for €83 more.
Is a dreadnought the right shape for fingerstyle?
Usually not — but this specific combination is an exception. Cedar’s low input threshold means the big body responds to fingers rather than demanding a heavy pick, and the mahogany keeps the low end tight enough to stay articulate. If you have wanted a dreadnought’s size and bass but found spruce dreads unresponsive under fingers, this is the configuration that solves it.
Should I buy this or a Martin D-15M?
Different arguments. The Martin gives you a mahogany top, traditional construction, a name with resale value and a dealer network on every continent. The Furch gives you a cedar top, the CNR System® Active, individual soundboard voicing, ebony appointments throughout and three nut-width options. If long-term stability and fingerstyle response matter most, take the Furch. If resale and heritage matter most, take the Martin.