MARTIN REIMAGINED

Martin’s recent overhaul of its standard acoustics owes something to both past and future

It’s fair to say that Martin doesn’t mess with an established formula lightly –after all, its classic dreadnought models such as the D-28 have virtually defined what great acoustic tone is on countless recordings. so why has the company overhauled all of its standard line in 2018? We caught up with Fred Greene, Director of Product Management, at NAAM to ask what this year’s ‘Reimagined’ guitars are all about.

“We wanted to get the guitars to where they had a more modern feel but a vintage [vibe] at the same time,” he said. “It’s a weird tightrope to walk. so we thought, let’s look at what people ordered – what options are they choosing? And everybody wanted forward-shifted, scalloped bracing. they wanted herringbone, they wanted binding that wasn’t bright, snow-white binding. they almost always chose some kind of an open-gear tuner. One of the main reasons there is that they are lighter – they don’t feel so neck-heavy. they wanted to get rid of the gold foil logo which felt very 90s – they wanted to get rid of dot inlays; they wanted diamonds and squares. Oddly enough, though, they wanted the most modern neck profile we offer. that’s our Performing Artist taper neck. And so it was kind of a weird combination of old and new. But then we had a lot of D-28s that had black pickguards that were left over from the 80s and 90s – and we knew we wanted to get them to a more tortoiseshell pickguard. We put all those combinations together on a guitar and looked at them [until we] said ‘that’s the way I would want my guitar’. the Martin brand is really a guitar player’s brand – they really own it. so you have to make decisions with them in mind and approach it from a consumer’s point of view.”