The Birth of the American Guitar | Documentary

the Civil War the Spanish-American War the Great Depression World War one and two Korea Vietnam and most recently the covert pandemic Martin guitars has survived and flourished throughout all these world events the company has grown to become the most respected maker of acoustic guitars in the history of the instrument Martin's influence is huge after a trip to the factory in October 2022 I learned far more about the legacy of the company and was inspired to make this documentary for you Martin guitars a short history [Music] thank you [Music] hi I'm Jason honor the archives museum manager at Martin guitar and it's great to have Mary with us today we're going to walk through the museum and take a look at the great collection we have here and learn a lot about the history of Martin guitar Mountain headstocks may be dated with 1833 but that's only the date when Martins were first made in the United States Martin guitar making dates back to as early as 1807 with records showing Johann George Martin making guitars in the family's ancestral home mark mccurkin in Germany the oldest document in our archives is Johan George Martin's baptismal certificate you will see if Martin senior's father and is from 1765. Johan Sun Christian Frederick Martin CF who had trained as a luthier in Vienna set sail for the New World Landing in New York City in 1833 before moving to Pennsylvania in 1839. now in this case we have the oldest Martin guitar are known to exist so this is a model from the earlier part of 1834. now one of the ways that you date these early modern guitars is off of the design of the label Martin went through a number of designs early on he only used some for a very short period and from the records we have in our archives we know that this guitar features the earliest label that he used it also lists his 196 Hudson Street address that is where the family set up their home and Shop when they arrived in New York City by looking at it you can see the heavy violin influence on these early guitars with the maple back and sides and just the figure eight shape now one thing I always point out when talking about early Martin guitars is yes they did use paper labels but Martin guitars always were stamped CF Martin New York or CF Martin and Company in New York or CF Martin and Company Nazareth Pennsylvania so you can break down the periods that they were built in based off of the stamps because all of these early guitars didn't have serial numbers [Music] can I take this one home his New York operation was more than just a music shop CF Martin imported and exported a range of instruments and music supplies and built guitars for customers and other music shopkeepers to sell but the Martin family didn't find New York to their tastes and on May 29 1839 CF Martin sold the shop and bought an eight-acre lot in Bushkill Township Pennsylvania by the 1850s business was thriving and sales ledgers show as many as 20 guitars a month being shipped to customers in 1852 215 guitars were built increasing to 303 the next year available in range of sizes CF Martin experimented with a range of styles going on to develop what would become recognizable as the American guitar we know today now one of the biggest Innovations to come out of the Cherry Hill period not just for Martin but for the entire acoustic guitar industry was x-bracing so we have in this case the earliest known x-brace guitar to exist it was built in 1843 for a performer named Madame nigoni she was the most popular concert guitarist on the East Coast during that time so what happened was according to the Martin family story see if Morton snuck away with her guitar and took the dimensions off of it and built the guitar with the same dimensions but what was completely different was the bracing system he built her the first xbraced guitar so this is the exact guitar that Martin built for Madame degoni Martin preferred to use Penn Bridges so as you see this guitar is a pin bridge and if he was using a traditional Spanish fan bracing sometimes he would hit the braces when he was drilling a pinhole and then he would have to either pull the top off of the guitar and repair the brace or replace it or just let it go and uh you know it probably wouldn't affect the guitar too much but we see guitars in the late 1830s and early 1840s where he's experimenting with different bracing patterns combining fan braces and kind of an x-rays pattern pattern until he builds this guitar uh obviously he must have really liked the way it sounded and the structural stability he gave the guitar because going forward pretty much all of Martin's guitars use x bracing and he fast forward to now the vast majority of our guitars are X-rays and most builders that builds flat top steel string guitars like we do use some form of X bracing attempting to keep track of the wood binding and decoration of each model accountants and bookkeepers devised a numerical system to differentiate them the first number was the size followed by a second two-digit number corresponding to the wholesale price I.E 1 to 21 was a size one that cost 21 wholesale the style numbers like 18 21 28 and 42 are still in use today after two highly successful decades the company was ready to expand a change in location was needed in 1859 the Martin family moved from Cherry Hill to a large lot on the corner of Maine and North streets in the town of Nazareth the family's home for the next Century here we have what a workbench would look like at the North Street Factory now really this could be Circa 1920 you have the Edison style bulbs but one of the most important things about this area is the tool case on the back wall because we believe these are the tools that see if Martin's senior came with when he came to the United States in 1833. the onset of the Civil War caused a steep drop in production but sales bounced back as word spread and demand for Martin's high quality guitars increased CF senior passed control of the business over to his son Frederick Jr in the mid-1850s after a stroke made him unable to continue working full-time in 1867 CF senior formed a co-partnership with his son and a nephew Christian Frederick Hartman who had followed the family to America from Germany the company stamp was changed to CF Martin and Co instead of CF Martin allowing the 19th century models to be divided into pre-1867 and post 1867. this was a period of refinement for the company as the more ornate models and features were phased out or standardized 1876-1879 were particularly hard years as the nation suffered an economic dip total annual sales dropped to roughly 100 guitars a year less than half of its output 20 years earlier by 1883 sales had picked up to over 250 a year again but the company faced continued challenges in 1888 CF Junior died at the age of 67 after a short illness Frank Henry Martin the first american-born man to head The company took over aged just 22. he faced an uncertain landscape as competitors learned in high profile players with endorsement deals a practice that Martin had been reluctant to participate in the company hadn't innovated in years and was weak in its marketing it desperately needed to modernize under Frank Henry Martin returned to selling direct to music dealers having previously been exclusively distributed by C.A zoebish and Sons of New York he ordered the company to start producing mandolins popular in the us at the time and slashed prices of their existing models to encourage sales the Emerging Market of western states of the USA exploded making up half of the company's Revenue in the early years of the 20th century Frank Henry continued refining the company eliminating older models and in 1898 amending the brand name from CF Martin and Co New York to CF Martin and Co Nazareth PA 60 years after leaving New York City Martin guitars were finally marked with their true origin from 1898 in a few short years more changes were made to Martin's line of guitars than had been made in the past 40 years Pearl position markers were added to the fretboards and larger sizes like the triple o were introduced in 1904 style 45 was added above Style 42 hand-rubbed French polish finish was replaced in favor of Sherlock and varnish but Martin still faced Fierce competition especially from an up-and-coming guitar company called Gibson who massively outranked them in sales Frank Henry knew Martin had to make substantial changes to stay in business changing from gut to Steel strings helped the bottom line but the company was saved by an explosion in popularity of a new type of music and it would transform their fortunes like never before in 1915 Hawaiian music swept America ukuleles were suddenly in such high demand that music dealers couldn't keep up Martin introduced its first models in January 1916 and for the next decade they accounted for the bulk of the company's income the origins of the ukulele go back to the island of Madeira off Portugal madeira's Chief crop was wine and in the 1870s there was a grape famine so wine production was way down so some of the men from Madeira left looking for work and they ended up in Hawaii because they heard that there was work in the sugar cane Fields there and they brought with them this little instrument they called the machete uh very quickly it caught on in Hawaii they started calling it the ukulele one of the most historically significant instruments we have in our museum is a ukulele that was owned by Richard Cotter he was an officer in the United States Navy uh he volunteered to go with Admiral Byrd on the first expedition to the North Pole uh while on that trip he became friends with birds pilot Floyd Bennett and he said to Bennett you know what I want a souvenir from this trip so Bennett agreed to smuggle the ukulele on the plane that him and bird were flying over the North Pole so they make the flight uh bird uh Bennett gives the ukulele back to Contour Contour has the crew of the ship sign it then there's a reception for them in Washington DC and he has the president of the US at the time Calvin Coolidge sign it Thomas Edison signed it you Amelia Earhart signed it uh and he also documented his travels on the ukulele right now we're building a reproduction that's made from Hawaiian KOA like the original but the signatures are laser engraved in the ukulele so you can see where everybody signed Hawaiian music also affected Martin's guitar production because in 1915 they start building their first steel string guitars for their customer Southern California music and so Hawaiian music features steel strings on a guitar where the guitar is played flat on your lap with with a steel bar there's two gentlemen that created this style of playing they were childhood friends in Honolulu Joseph kakuku and Makia kealakai and so when you look at how Hawaiian music changed popular music it's really important to to state that fact that they really those two gentlemen and Hawaiian music really changed the way the guitar would be played in the future because all of these Hawaiian musicians were touring the United States in the 19 teens and 1920s and you can hear their influence on country music on Blues all of these different genres of music that are popular now Martin Grew From selling 162 guitars and 300 mandolins in 1915 to 1 524 mandolins 1 336 guitars and 3150 ukuleles in 1920 extraordinary growth for a five-year period for the first time Frank Henry's biggest problem was that demand outstripped Supply in 1921 Frank Henry officially turned Martin guitars into a corporation with his wife and two sons as the other shareholders new buildings were added to the factory to increase production capacity Martin's regular six-string model had remained pretty much unchanged for decades but as the Hawaiian craze faded it refocused its efforts on the instrument that had first put the company on the map from 1921 to 1935 Martin created more new guitar models and made more changes than any time in the company's history enter the om-28 the late 1920s through World War II was considered the Golden Era of more and one of the key Innovations from that time are the orchestra models the first Orchestra model which was an om-28 was built for a banjo player named Perry Bechtel so this was 1929 he was a plectrum banjo player which I guess uh that style of banjo was losing popularity so he was looking to switch over to being more of a guitar player found Arch top guitars that he liked but he couldn't find any flat top guitars so he contacted Martin and asked if they could build him a guitar with a 15 fret knack and they thought about it and they were like you know what we don't think it would be stable maybe we can build one with a 14 fret neck so what they did was they took their triple o guitar and squared off the shoulders and then took a longer Slimmer neck and created this brand new style of guitar the om-28 became a hit with a lot of early Jazz guitars that were looking to switch over from you know if they weren't playing an arch Top guitar to a flat top guitar and very quickly Martin started to change over their entire lineup to the new 14th fret design and really when you look at the om-28 that was built in 1929 that's considered the first modern acoustic guitar because if you look at that guitar and look at what we build now there's so many similarities and that's one of the reasons why the guitars from that period through World War II go for so much money I mean the values of them in this case we have a 1930 om45 Deluxe where there was only 11 of them built in 1930 so it's probably the rarest guitar we have in our collection and because of that it's worth around three hundred thousand dollars so when you look at this guitar I mean it looks like something that the company would build today Not only was Martin building 14 fret guitars at that time other builders took notice and started changing over their lineups to similar designs so the reason why this is a deluxe model and not just an om-45 is it had an inlaid pick guard and an inlaid bridge and the reason why Martin only Built 11 of them was because they had trouble sourcing these materials because they weren't done in-house Martin would do the inlay on the on the top of the guitar and the fingerboard but not on the pickguard one of the unique features about this Guitar I Should point out is the neck profile so it's slightly asymmetrical and the neck on this guitar was the basis for the next on our modern Deluxe models so that vintage Deluxe neck profile is taken from this om45 Deluxe oh [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] introduced in 1929 the guitar was an instant success with its long slim neck solid headstock and pickguard the OM has been heralded as the first truly modern Flat Top guitar initially designed for plectrum playing in orchestras the OM was adopted by Cowboy bands America's Newfound musical Obsession and in 1932 the iconic gold decal was added to the headstock the stock market crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression devastating not just Martin but the music industry as a whole compared to the ukulele boom years where the company sold about 10 000 a year sales collapsed to just over 700 annually by 1933. the work week was reduced to three days and the factory produced only what it was sure it could sell but during this time Martin introduced what would become its most popular model the Dreadnought the guitars that Martin is probably best known for are our Dreadnought models the d18 the D28 so the origins of the Dreadnought actually go back to 1916. I mentioned Mickey earlier the Hawaiian guitars while Martin had built a special instrument for him that was larger than a Triple O and Martin was building special instruments for their dealer uh the Dixon company where they had this wide waisted shape it was a different design they saw the drawings for the kealakai guitar and asked Martin if Martin could build them something the size of the kealakai guitar but but in their special shape so Martin did they built this really large guitar and they weren't quite sure what to call it so it was World War One era and they decided to borrow the name of the British warship the HMS Dreadnought for their guitar so when you look at a Dreadnought a D28 d18 that that's what that d stands for it stands for Dreadnought here we have one of the original dreadnoughts a Ditson 111. the Ditson 111 is pretty similar to a d18 spruce top mahogany back and sides a little bit different inlay but you can see from this guitar it is the 12th fret design so it's a very large body a wider neck and the neck is shorter now Morton built less than 30 of these for didson before they went out of business in 1930. and Martin decided what had to decide what they wanted to do with the Dreadnought at that point what they did was they decided to build it under their own name and sell it to all of their dealers and here we have the first D28 so like the Ditson 111 it's that larger design so early on Martin really didn't sell too many dreadnoughts it's when the company switched the Dreadnought to the OM design the 14 fret design that's when Dreadnought models really took off with the early country and Bluegrass musicians at that time now you can't really talk about pre-war dreadnoughts without mentioning the d45 so to a lot of guitar collectors a pre-war d45 is the Holy Grail the most collectible acoustic guitar I've ever built Martin only Built 91 before they stopped production because of World War II we actually have number 80 out of 91 in our Museum in 1933 Martin built the first d45 for Gene Autry which was the larger 12 fret design but then they in 1934 started building 14 fret models like this now the d45 went through a few changes the company would change the fingerboard inlay to this Art Deco hexagon design in 1938 now originally style 45 instruments all had snowflakes inlaid on the fingerboard but Morton wanted to set the d45 aside they saw how popular their dreadnoughts were becoming so they gave the d45 this new design to go along with the arch top guitars they were building at the time now this guitar is pretty much all original except at some point somebody put a strap button on the heel I guess they were playing some shows or something and wanted to use a strap instead of the uh old strap the the tie that would go through the headstock I mean I could see why they wouldn't want to use that on a guitar like this anyway because you wouldn't want to block the beautiful pearl inlay on this head plate these are the most collectible flat tops this guitar is worth around five hundred thousand dollars large and Loud the Dreadnought was just what singers had been looking for an instrument with enough power to compete with horns fiddles and other loud instruments the Dreadnought d18 became one of the company's best sellers and Martin wrote out the depression thanks to its Innovations flexibility and low existing depth World War II LED to shortages of materials like brass and steel less successful instruments were shelved and by 1944 the Martin catalog was much leaner half the size of a few years previously now that period the 1940s the late 1940s through 1963 this is really when you see bluegrass music country music then rock rock and roll and folk music becoming very very popular they start to bypass big band music uh become the most popular genre of music for their time in here we have a pretty unique guitar when it comes to the history of guitars in general it was owned by a gentleman named Fred clay who was in a country band in Southern California uh he happened to be friends with Leo Fender at this time Leo Fender was building amps and PAs he hadn't gotten into a guitar building yet he was also building uh lap steel guitars so Fred clay goes into his shop and says you know what I'm having trouble being hurt in my band can you help me out uh so what Leo did was he hooked up one of his lap steel pickups to Fred's triple o 18 and that happened to be Leo Fender's first experiment at electrifying a fretted instrument so here you can see the work that Leo Fender did on this triplo 18. his lap steel pickup right here uh I mean it doesn't look that pretty but hopefully for Fred clay it served the purpose and he was people were able to hear him on stage but it's just another groundbreaking instrument that we have in our collection Frank Henry retired in 1945 leaving behind a legacy to be proud of he had successfully steered the company through tremendous adversity he was succeeded by CF Martin III Frederick whose own son Frank quickly became Martin's head of sales hitting the road and discovering the demand for Martin guitars was far greater than had been thought he became vice president in 1963 and spearheaded the move to a new 62 000 square foot factory on the Southeast corner of Bale and Sycamore streets ramping up production to help capitalize on the booming new folk movement pictured everywhere at Woodstock the Martin D28 was fast becoming an iconic instrument in the same field as the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson Les Paul Martin sold over 14 000 guitars in 1969. if you would have went into a Martin dealer in the late 1950s in order to D28 they would have told you to come back in three years because that's how bad the backlog was for Morton at that time so they knew they needed to change at that point they were still in in the North Street Factory which was expanded on multiple times it was four stories high and it just wasn't large enough for them to keep up with the demand at the time during that time Frank Herbert Martin who was CF Martin the third son started working for the company and he was really in tune with the music scene at the time he was in his 20s and uh he saw the way music was trending and he started urging his father to build a bigger more modern Factory so in 19 late 1963 the company broke ground and then opened the Sycamore Street Factory in July of 1964. that's the factory we're in now that's where our Museum's at where you can take a tour and from that after the Sycamore Street Factory opens you can see production totals really start going up so by the early 1970s Martin is building over 20 000 guitars a year which for them that was a huge amount uh in this case we have a special guitar that was owned by Joan Baez so in the 1960s she was one of the best known full performers at the time she used primarily a single o45 from 1929 but she met a woman at the University of California and fell in love with This Woman's Cinco 40. it was a model from around 1880 that was owned by the woman's grandmother but Joan convinced the woman to trade two guitars for her single o 45 and so Joan used this guitar in the mid-1960s on tours and on albums uh but eventually the woman she traded the guitar with felt bad because it was her grandmother so Joan was nice enough to give it back to her but eventually it made its way to our Museum the coolest feature about this guitar is that it has Joan baez's setlist still taped to the side so you can see what she was playing when she was doing live shows little less appointments in style 45 so this doesn't have the thing uh the Pearl inlay around the extension of the fingerboard on the top and also like a style of 42 doesn't have Pearl around the back and the sides this is a 1929 o18k that was owned by Les Paul it was his uh first good guitar I guess he had a cheaper Sears catalog guitar before this and you know he was getting better on the guitar so he told his mom you know I need something better to learn on so she bought this for him now if you look it has numbers written on the fingerboard that less put there so I guess he would sneak out of his home at night to go to a jazz club in Waukesha Wisconsin where he was from to see a local uh Jazz guitarist and he would write down on a napkin where he was playing and then he would go home and try to play in the same spots on this guitar so very important part of Guitar History right here in late 1969 Martin had to cease using Brazilian rosewood as the country introduced an embargo on the export of these rare and valuable raw logs the company switched to Indian Rosewood a sales boomed a peak in 1971 with over 22 000 guitars built that Year Frank Martin used the prophets to acquire darker strings and a second string Factory Bridgeport musical strings consolidating the two created the highly lucrative Martin string division but not all was well at Nazareth by the mid-1970s there was a period of strife between the company's employees and its leadership culminating in a strike that lasted eight months before a group of employees resigned from the union and returned to work guitar sales in the 1980s plummeted as the popularity of synthesizer's reshaped modern music Martin made an ill-fated attempt to enter the electric guitar Market with its 28 series which was abandoned in 1983. in 1982 the company sold just 3 000 guitars its worst sales in over four decades enter Chris Martin Frank Martin's first child and only son who took his place at the company in 1978 having studied business administration at Boston University in 1979 Martin announced the custom shop allowing customers greater freedom in their chosen design and also giving Martin valuable information on what customers actually wanted some of the most popular Custom Shop Creations would eventually make it to stock status like the hd28 variation called the custom 15. during this period Frank Martin's increasingly erratic Behavior combined with a series of poor business decisions and failed Investments resulted in him being asked to resign by the board of directors in May 1982. the vice president C Hugh Bloom also known as Tigger was appointed president Frank died in 1993 and while he is often linked to the company's troubles in the 1970s he's also responsible for much of Martin's success in the folk music era in 1983 Martin guitars celebrated 150 years of business in 1985 CF Martin III nominated his grandson Chris now age 30 to the position of Vice President of marketing one of his early successes was the j-40 a hybrid guitar with a body shape of an M38 but the added depth of the Dreadnought the Dreadnought shape had become closely associated with country Bluegrass and folk rock so the j-40 gave players that desirable Martin tone without the associate associations of any particular genre and the timing couldn't have been better as in 1985 the acoustic guitar began to return in popularity as a new generation of singer-songwriters many of them women stepped into the Limelight a new lower priced Dreadnought the D16 was introduced to the market in 1986 and was an immediate success made in Nazareth it sounded every bit as good as the other models Martin had dominated the higher end market for a while now but it had found a winning formula lower price models that didn't compromise on quality CF Martin III died in 1986 at the age of 91 having steered the company through its fair share of trouble at age 31 Chris Martin was voted in as CEO by the board hoping that once again a family member would steer the company out of trouble the stock valuation that same year recommended the company be liquidated Chris Martin had his work cut out a low price triple o16m was introduced as where the b40 and B65 acoustic bases and in November 1989 MTV premiered its new show film MTV Unplugged which showed acoustic guitars were firmly back in the public Consciousness the om-21 made it to stock in 1992 and was an immediate hit with finger-style guitar players two years after its introduction it became the top selling non-dreadnought in the Martin lineup portable Backpacker guitars were another surprise hit with over 5000 orders placed at the 1993 NAMM Show NASA astronaut Pierre thought even took one into space with him on a 13-day Excursion on the Columbia Space Shuttle in 1994. technological advances in CNC technology made it possible to bring the company's Artisan practices into the Modern Age the D1 introduced in 1993 was the first Model constructed with a new mortise and Tenon neck joint and patented A-frame top racing at a list price of just 995 dollars including a hard shell case the company struck a balance with an expanded line of low price models and prestigious reissues of vintage models along with the occasional luxury limited edition models like the d45 deluxe limited to just 60 and with a price tag of 18 000 1994 was a landmark moment that saw the introduction of the Gene Autry signature edition d45 Martin's first signature edition for a living performer no expense was spared on the 66 guitars and they sold for 22 000 each with a portion of the sale price going to the Autry Western Heritage Museum in Los Angeles Martin had been reluctant to get involved in Celebrity endorsements until now with a policy that if you saw a famous performer playing a Martin they had used their own money to buy it that would change thanks in part to one man Eric Clapton Clapton's 1992 MTV Unplugged and the CD that followed firmly reintroduced the acoustic guitar back into public Consciousness after the Wilderness years of the 1980s Martin were inundated with calls about which guitar R Clapton had been playing two triple o models a stock 1939-042 and a 1960s triple o28 that had been modified with style 45 inlays and binding on the neck Martin responded by bringing out its signature Clapton a Triple O 42 with a style 45 neck a limited run of 461 tied in with Clapton's latest album 461 Ocean Boulevard sold out immediately much to the company's surprise they had previously never exceeded 200 Sales of any limited edition in 1986 CF Martin III passes away and the board of directors vote Chris Martin to be CEO and chairman of the board so he's only 31 at the time Martin is the oldest guitar builder in the world a very big responsibility for him what he did was he started taking suggestions from the employees that actually built the instruments here at Martin then we see MTV Unplug come out and the interest in acoustic music from that point really starts going up so some of the pivotal performances on MTV Unplugged were Eric Clapton on that show he's playing his 1939 triple o 42. another another Monumental performance Was Nirvana and on that show Kurt Cobain was playing a 1959 d18e we have the d18 that Kurt Cobain owned prior to the guitar he played unplugged this is Grandpa uh Kurt Cobain's 1953 d-18 so he acquired this guitar from Mary Lou Lord who he met when Nirvana had just released their never mind album they were starting to tour to support that album and Kurt and Mary Lou Lord became friends and she knew that he needed a guitar for his tour so they both love this guitar they nicknamed it Grandpa because it was old and beat up and so she gave it to him so Nirvana blows up and pretty much changes popular music in the 1990s so Kurt played this guitar for a few years but then he eventually gave it back to Mary Lou Who then became friends with Elliot Smith and then he played it for a few years and then she got it back and uh she ended up selling the guitar and then we purchased it for our collection uh it's a pretty crazy to think that the d18e that Kurt Cobain played unplugged sold for six million dollars at an auction a couple of years ago and to think what this guitar would be worth if we would do the same but I don't think we're ever going to let it leave our Museum foreign [Music] a lot of people when they think of acoustic guitars or Martin guitar they don't think of bands like Motorhead but I mean indeed when Motorhead played acoustic guitars they played Martin's and we have a guitar in our collection that we let them borrow it got dropped and damaged but they felt bad about him good enough to pay for the guitar at the same time the demand for replicas of vintage guitars exploded as the baby boomer generation finally had enough money to purchase the guitars they'd always wanted Martin as well as Gibson and Fender saw the incredible demand for vintage stratocasters Les Paul's and Martin d28s with vintage guitars strictly Limited in Number the companies responded with lovingly made reissues recreated right down to the tiniest detail the original model that was used for our first authentic was a d18 we also have done D28 Authentics from 1941 and 1930 37 the om-45 deluxe authentic the 1930 Model we did a size one madame negoni authentic the key to making a new guitar sound like a vintage guitar isn't how it's built really and one of the things that we changed on our authentic guitars in 2014 is we started using our vintage tone system Tops on them VTS tops where where we use the process of torification to age them because you can build a new guitar the same way that a vintage guitar was built but there's really nothing you can do to advance the aging process of the wood until we found out about torification so that's why we use it on those tops because they're the most accurate new guitars when compared to a vintage instrument and that's the key that's why people pay so much money for Martin guitars from that pre-war period not just because you know they're old and cool but it's because they sound so good business boomed as a range of new models found Their audience over 22 000 guitars were shipped out from Nazareth in 1996 the highest number since 1971's record the following years they beat it by another 10 000. 1997 also saw signature models for Paul Simon Johnny Cash and Arlo Guthrie with Willie Nelson's N20 following in 1999. the world had an appetite for Martin guitars and Chris Martin had seemingly steered the company through one of its roughest patches to a period of great success production exploded at one winternam the late 1990s over 30 new models were brought to market the company also began exploring using alternative sustainable Woods known as smartwood the company now asks each dealer to support the program by buying at least one smartwood model a year one of the artists that we worked with was Sting so the conservation of Natural Resources is very important to sting and so when we went about building hissing miniature models the woods that we Source had to come from sustainable forests we had to prove that to him in order to build them so that's when we started building with uh back and side Woods like Cherry reclaimed Spruce from bridge Timbers in Canada and Alaska a wood for the fingerboarding Bridge from Mexico called catalosh and that really put us on the path of where we're at now because the vast majority of the woods we use are FSC certified that come from sustainable forest and I mean one of that's one of the tricky things about being in the guitar business is that especially for Martin because we've been around so long and used these core Woods like Rosewood and Spruce and Ebony mahogany for for you know almost two centuries now that that's what a lot of people expect but we need to show people that there are other viable tone Woods that we can use to make guitars that sound just as good as a guitar built from those other Woods because who knows 50 years down the road those guitars might not or those woods might not be available uh in the late 1990s Martin also introduces guitars made with hpl or X Series which is another alternative to solid tone Woods originally they were built in our Factory here in Nazareth but now all of the x-series models are built in our Factory in Navajo and Mexico 1998 saw the largest expansion in Martin's history adding 90 000 square feet to the Sycamore Street Factory doubling its previous size and night shift 2 was added to avoid overcrowding as the company tried to keep up with the incredible demand in 1998 guitar production had jumped up to 44 000 in 1999 it was 55 000. in 2001 65 000 and in 2006 82 000. in 2006 the museum that we're in now was opened at the Martin Factory I know it was important for Chris Martin to showcase the history of his family and the history of his family's company this is the special hand-painted Robert gets a 175th commemorative model as you can see on the top of the guitar has a lot of the history of the company you have a photo of CF Martin senior the North Street Factory and early Stouffer guitar along with the label the Martin family motto non-salta said maltum quantity quality over quantity if you want something like a 1937 D28 but you don't have a hundred thousand dollars to buy one you can get a D28 authentic for around 8 000 so I mean when you look at that they're they're a bargain at the 2004 NAMM Show the company celebrated its 1 millionth guitar a luxury Dreadnought stunningly decorated with 40 inlaid rubies and diamonds and scenes from the company's history by inlay artist Larry Robinson and at NAMM 2022 the company celebrated its 2.5 millionth guitar designing the beautiful jewel encrusted custom D 2.5 Millions attended by Yours Truly Platinum mounted diamonds in five different sizes Adorn the guitar in the pattern of the Stars visible in the sky on the night of November 6 1833 the day Christian Frederick Martin first stepped off the boat in New York City serial 2.5 million is decorated with 436 lab created diamonds six natural Sapphires and one Ruby which marks the location of the original Martin shop in New York City the guitar will reside in the Martin guitar Museum in Nazareth as a fitting tribute to the man who started it all morning guitar has a great history of innovation you look at expiration the OM model the Dreadnought and then to add to that the se13e which was the best-selling acoustic electric guitar of 2021. it just goes to show that the company just doesn't settle for what we've done in the past we're always looking to break the mole they give the guitars the ultimate guitar thank you for watching this documentary I'd like to thank the authors Richard Johnston and Dick boek whose book Martin guitars a history is essential reading for any Martin fan and provided much of the research for this film foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Mary Spender

Views: 180,488

Keywords: martin, d28, comparison, vintage, brazilian rosewood, acoustic guitar, Martin d28, reimagined, 1942, 2019, cheap, expensive, cheap vs expensive, expensive guitars, test, best guitars, guitar expert, challenge, verses, rare guitars, rosewood, spruce, adirondack, indian, tone woods, volume, old guitar, rare guitar, vintage guitar, comparing, martin guitar, history, documentary

Id: 5T4rnaFedlA

Length: 43min 31sec (2611 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2023