Sink Or Swim?
Scott Sasser, head of Martin’s Custom Shop, explains why sinker mahogany is taking its place alongside some of the world’s premium tonewoods
When the brace of sinker mahogany powered triple-0s arrived in the Guitarist offices, we were struck by the additional pep in the step that this rare and slightly unusual bodywood delivered. Living up to Martin’s promise of a huge voice and enhanced responsiveness, it’s difficult to believe that – for much of its life – this timber has been submerged in the alien environment of a middle American river. From a 300-year leftover from the logging industry, how do we connect the dots that lead us to the point where this timber would even be considered for musical instruments?
“Our relationship with sinker began several years ago,” director of Martin’s Custom Shop, Scott Sasser, begins. “In [various] countries around the world, material reclamation has become part of local economies and our vendor presented us with an opportunity – some unique mahogany that had been reclaimed, having been under water in Belize for
generations and generations. When we began investigating this material, we learned a little bit about the time of its harvest and about its relative age, and the sinker presented itself to us as being among the oldest materials that we would have the opportunity to work with.
“When these trees were first harvested, they were anywhere in the neighbourhood of 150 to 300 years old, then introduced into the rivers and floated down towards the port where they would be further processed and shipped all around the world. Some of the logs that were heaviest and more dense would have been on the bottom of this floating mass and they would just get pushed further and further towards the riverbed until a number would just get stuck in the mud. They would be stuck in this cold, dark river environment and not see the light of day for another 300 years. So we’re talking material that would have been cut during the early colonial expansion times.”
Above and beyond the wood’s unusual life history, there were other implications that were close to Martin’s heart for this particular crop of sinker mahogany.
“We believe it could have been consistent with the mahogany that Christian Frederick Martin was building from when he first came to the new country and established his business in Manhattan. So there was that time parallel… we had a bit of a time machine on our hands and, of course, we felt very privileged to be working with material like that.”
“We believe it could have been consistent with the mahogany that CF Martin was building from when he first came to the new country”
When they started working with the mahogany, it soon began to yield its own character, as Scott explains.
“We saw the after-effects of this wood having been preserved under water. The river has its own microclimate, so you’ve got this mineralisation process that’s occurring while the log is submerged, almost as if it’s becoming part of a petrified forest. There’s this metamorphosis that takes place, and when we were processing the wood we noticed that it was more coarse internally and it would cause more rapid wear on the tooling and the machinery. We could tell that some transformation had occurred in the hundreds of years that the material had been submerged.
“The folks in the wood room described it to me as the sawdust it created when it was being further pulled through the tooling was almost sanding itself and the wood got this nice glossy sheen to it, unlike freshly harvested material. So it took on this look that was a characteristic of this
“It required the wood being in the harshest environment you can consider, but it had this preservation character… Somewhere in between is this magic equilibrium”
metamorphosis that it had been undergoing for hundreds of years under water.”
In order to test the effects of the sinker mahogany in terms of tonal benefit, Martin undertook some of its own experiments, building identical guitars using sinker in one instrument so that a comparison became possible.
“I gotta tell you, the first time we heard the instruments played the difference was real,” says Scott, underlining the magic of this tonewood. “We are privileged to hear many, many great guitars, but occasionally if someone comes into the office and gives one a strum and we’ve all got our backs turned and everybody simultaneously turns around and it’s quiet for a moment, we think we may be onto something! That’s kind of the presence that sinker mahogany gave to that construction, compared to regular fresh-harvest mahogany. While it doesn’t have the deep bass character that Brazilian or Madagascar rosewood might have, it had that additional headroom. It was like everything you wanted to hear out of a mahogany instrument; it just seemed to have a greater presence.
“You can play the same song on an iPod, on an mp3, and then you can get a little better resolution if you go to a Super Audio CD and then, lo and behold, someone comes in and drops the needle on a great turntable on a heavyweight piece of vinyl… It’s still the same song, but the vinyl has that presence. You know it’s there, it’s undeniable, it’s everything that you know that song to be, but it’s like you’ve never heard it before. It was everything you want mahogany to be, turned up a little bit.”
We mention to Scott that we felt there was additional presence and sparkle in our Sitka-topped triple-0 review model, while we found there to be more bluesy grunt in the all-mahogany guitar.
“And it’s not to the detriment of any other frequency that’s there,” he agrees. “We sometimes have the opportunity to go into our museum here at the Martin factory and pull from the display an instrument that is very old, and you can hear this maturation that the instrument has gone through. It may be lighter in weight, it’s spent all of its life expressing off moisture and we often talk about the difference in character between a truly vintage instrument and something that’s made today. They both sound good, but there’s a little something extra in the vintage instrument that comes with time and playing and, like you say, there’s that presence that happens.
“It was such an unexpected but welcome revelation to be able to hear with mahogany, because we spend so much time chasing this idea of perfection that Brazilian brings to the table and here’s this sleeper that just kinda snuck up on the world in the form of sinker mahogany. It required the wood being in the harshest environment you can consider, but it had this preservation character and, on the way to becoming a petrified piece of lumber, somewhere in between is this magic equilibrium that we’ve been able to capture.”