Revolution Rock
Martin’s vice president of product management, Fred Greene, explains some of the concepts and rationale behind the SC-13E, and admits that one aim of the design was to “upset the old guard”
It’s telling that the early videos made by Martin to support the launch of the SC-13E feature very electric guitar-style soundtracks. There are no delicate droptuned fingerstyle dabblings to accompany the images. It’s all a little unnerving, a perception that’s not helped in that no sooner do we catch up with Fred Greene than we’re discussing our mutual love of Joe Strummer and The Clash. What on earth is going on?
“I’m sitting here with my Telecaster,” explains Fred. “I have a Telecaster because of Joe Strummer. I always like that it feels good, stood up around my neck. I wanted an acoustic guitar that felt that way: not too big, not too heavy,” he explains getting back on topic. “Certain guitars when you stand up and play can either make you look better or look worse. It’s very hard to look cool playing a Steinberger, isn’t it? It might play great, but… On the other hand, some guitars make everyone look cool. So we tried to make a guitar that when you stand up makes you look cool. It didn’t look strange or weird, but it didn’t look overly traditional. But then it has to balance in the right place on your knee, so, again, a lot of thought went into that.”
It’s pretty obvious that “a lot of thought” went into this entire project, but it did start with that shape. “It was an outline I sort of had been doodling. I’m a notorious doodler during meetings and while you often just turn the page, this one kept coming up again and again. There was a feeling of wanting that offset look on an acoustic guitar. How would that work for Martin? You know, that sort of Jazzmaster, Jaguar vibe. It just felt quite organic and easy to draw.
“But after we’d played around with it for a bit we could never seem to get the heel; it would be too difficult to manufacture a [conventional] heel with that slant [at the top of the body]. That was what was holding us up and we also felt that the shape by itself wasn’t compelling enough to justify the expense of all the tooling. It wasn’t until we started thinking about changing the neck joint that it really became a project.”
Clampdown
“There’s certainly an element of a bolt-on at work, but not in the way you’d think of in most guitars today,” Fred begins in explaining the new Sure Align neck joint.
“You see two bolts [one in the scooped heel area and the other on the back], but in no way do they actually enter the neck of the guitar. So the dovetail is bolted on and, of course, the dovetail pulls the neck into the body, so it’s almost an applied dovetail, more so than a bolt-on neck: it’s a very unique hybrid of the bolt-on concept and the dovetail concept.
“We certainly had the opportunity to just bolt on the neck – and that would have been much easier for us,” he admits. “It would have been effective and it would have worked, but it just didn’t feel Martinesque and we didn’t feel it really moved the art of the guitar forward. So we wanted to challenge ourselves to do something that felt more true to who we are as a brand, but at the same time be as interesting and compelling from a sonic standpoint. By developing this sort of applied dovetail – where the two bolts enter a dovetail neck
“The neck is a very unique hybrid of the bolt-on concept and the dovetail concept” Fred Greene
joint and then the neck slides onto the dovetail and then the dovetail is pulled tight to the body – we felt that was Martin, and Martin guitars have a dovetail neck joint. That allowed us, so to speak, to bridge the gap between a bolt-on and a traditional dovetail neck joint.”
As we state in our preceding review, it’s also the first Martin to feature a 13thfret neck joint instead of the much more common 12th- or 14th-fret join. “It was about wanting the instrument to feel comfortable and look right when you stood up with it, but at the same time not be overly neck heavy. We wanted to retain that 25.4-inch scale length but for it to feel shorter, like a 24.9-inch scale, so that when you stood up with it, it was a little more like an electric guitar. The 13th fret thing then was a compromise piece allowing us to keep the bridge back, keep the 25.4-inch sound we liked better on this particular guitar, but at the same time it pulled the nut a little closer to the body in a way that felt a little more comfortable to play.”
The Right Profile
The so-called ‘Low Profile Velocity’ neck profile is another departure with the SC-13E, although part of its more electriclike appeal was actually inspired by a
“We wanted people to notice how easy the guitar was to play, so we set the guitar [action] low” Fred Greene
much older Martin. “Martin guitars have normally had symmetrical necks, but when we were doing some research as part of our Custom Shop Authentic instruments, we had an older OM-45 Deluxe in the museum; I think it was from 1931. Everyone really loved its neck and we decided to digitise it so we could recreate it. But going through our digital measurements, we discovered it actually had an asymmetrical neck shape. Now, the craftsperson carving that neck probably just took a little more off or made it the way they felt made it the best. Obviously, they weren’t using CNC machines in those days! But we loved it and we recreated that neck several years ago on an Authentic. Ever since then we’ve been toying with the idea of doing more asymmetrical necks.
“Technology today allows us to do things that just weren’t practical even 10 years ago, so I thought, ‘Well, what’s the point of having this technology that allows you to do all these things if all you’re going to do is cut straight lines with it?’ So we thought, ‘Let’s take advantage of that [technology] and push the boundaries a little bit, understand that guitar players are changing and their expectations are different nowadays.’
“You’re absolutely right in terms of specifications of it being similar to the Taylor neck. We admire a lot of what Taylor does – they do some really great guitars and they are super-nice people. We talk. They’ve been to our factory; we’ve been to theirs. It’s not an adversarial relationship: we compete from a sales standpoint, but it’s a friendly competition. So we admired that neck and wanted to take that and move it one step further and make some modifications to it to feel the way we felt like it should be. We rounded the edges a little more and thinned it out in a couple of spots and just made it our guitar.”
As we report, the SC-13E’s setup is pretty low, even for an electric guitar, let alone an acoustic. “Yes, it is set low,” Fred agrees. “We wanted people to notice how easy the guitar was to play, so we sort of made a point of making sure we set the guitar a little lower than we normally would. Part of the reason is that we made the neck easy to adjust and we don’t have that option on our other guitars – and we ship with light-gauge strings rather than medium. I think your readers should understand that you can get more volume and it will change the sound with medium-gauge strings, as opposed to light. This guitar seems to react to string gauge more.”
And although the Sure Align neck system allows pitch and intonation adjustment, “we’re advising people take it to an authorised dealer”, says Fred. “Later on we will be putting out ‘How to…’ videos, because no matter how much I tell people to take it to an authorised dealer so that everything gets done correctly, I know there are the adventurous types out there who are going to do it themselves anyway. It is pretty simple under the hood. It’s almost so simple it makes you feel like, why didn’t someone else think of this sooner?”