Interview by Bob Goldman

Martin Guitars is the oldest manufacturer of guitars in the United States. They have been manufacturing guitars since 1833 and have come up with some of the most important innovations for acoustic guitars. They are responsible for the X bracing and the Dreadnaught shaped guitars, which have become the standard for acoustic guitars. Martin Guitars are known for making the finest acoustic guitars you can buy. They are a family owned company and are now in their sixth generation and going as strong as ever. Chris Martin IV made himself available for this interview. Not only is he there at the factory, but he has also been known to give the tours of the factory when needed. Having taken the tour several times myself, it is definitely an educational experience which any acoustic guitar player should take.

BG: Where do you see the future of guitars due to the wood shortage?
CM: I follow some of these discussion groups. Acoustic Guitar has an interesting one and there is the unofficial Martin Guitar forum and there seems to be an acceptance and acknowledgment of the fact that woods are getting more scarce. The more people accept and acknowledge that, the easier the future will be in terms of introducing alternatives. There are alternative woods, temperate hard woods like walnut, cherry, ash. Tropical hardwoods, my understanding is they take a long time to regenerate, but there are other tropical hardwoods. It may be a case where after the three piece back, someday there may be four piece backs and five piece backs. I also have learned to like these manufactured wood materials, like the high pressure laminate.

BG: From the X series?
CM: Yes. We have had a lot of luck with them and the beauty from a manufacturing standpoint, is you call up the vendor and he ships it to you. It's not a question of him having to search through the jungle to find the perfect tree, but I think it is inevitable that Rosewood, Mahogany, and Ebony are going to get more scarce and more expensive.

BG: Do you see any wood of the future?
CM: It's going to be hard to say. They obviously were very good woods. Whoever picked them, they were picked before my family even got into the business, did a good job. Which wood in particular will take their place? I don't know at this point.

BG: Any new guitar shapes or sizes that you see in the future?
CM: I wonder about that. We have quite an investment in the shapes that we have. It is not an easy thing for us to make a new shape. I have watched with quite a bit of interest some of the things that individual luthiers can do in terms of shapes. To be honest with you, I haven't seen anything really catch the publics interest that isn't something that we or Gibson in particular have already done.

BG: Do you see them getting bigger?
CM: There again it's an issue of the wood and you are going to be into multi-piece backs and multi-piece tops. When Scott Chinery was alive, a Martin copy of what I believe was a Larson Brothers guitar called The Goliath was huge. The interesting thing was, Scott was a big guy and on him it looked perfect, on me, you couldn't see me. I toy with the idea of coming out with one of those just to see how people would react, but the darn thing is just humongous.

BG: I have many different size Martins and the Jumbo just has a great sound to it, so I was thinking what would happen if you went bigger.
CM: Gibson's Jumbo is bigger, they have the J-200. Somebody said that our J-40 is more like a Gibson J-180.

BG: How about the wood for the fingerboard?
CM: Ebony is a challenge and there is something beautiful about that black wood. That is why Micartaworks from a visual standpoint, it mimics the look of Ebony. Rosewood fingerboards are easier to get, but it's not as durable. Ebony is really durable, but comes from deep in the jungle, the trees are not big. In Africa they pay three or four dollars a gallon for gasoline, so there is a lot of expense involved in going in and finding the tree, getting it out and getting it to America.

BG: That's going to be a huge problem.
CM: Yes, and with necks, Mahogany is an issue. We are starting now to substitute Spanish Cedar which is another tropical Mahogany like wood. We are using that on some of the less expensive guitars. It seems to work fine. It has a little different grain pattern.

BG: Do you see yourself going back to maybe the old style dart necks so that you can use a shorter piece of wood?
CM: We are putting some wings on the headstock and resourcing some smaller Mahogany.If we do that, I don't know if we are going to cover it up, or if we will say, hey we had to piece the neck together, it's durable. Generally a good wood to wood glue bond is stronger than the surrounding wood.

BG: Supposedly the dart neck, even though it is made out of Cedar, is stronger than the one piece Mahogany neck.
CM: Yes, if you do the good bonding and you have good glue, it is going to break around the glue joint.

BG: Are you coming up with new glues now?
CM: We may be a big guitar company, but we are actually a small purchaser of things like glues, so we are at the mercy of the vendors. When they come up with a new glue, first we have to remind them to tell us of it and then we have to see if it fits in terms of health and safety. Does it function? We have had a lot of success with that tight bond. That white glue. It really works. We are using some super glue. We were challenged with the Aluminum top guitars because none of the glues we were using worked. In that case we did have to go to the vendor and say, "What do you have to glue wood to Aluminum?" They said, "Oh, we have this glue."

BG: Plus the expansion and contraction rates are different on wood and Aluminum.
CM: You put it with the H.P.L. That stuff is pretty inert. So it is not going anywhere. That guitar has had a lot of positive reaction. Visually people get very excited about it.

BG: Are there any new designs that you see coming out?
CM: We have had a lot of success with the H.P.L. line. We introduced a OO shaped, cutaway thin body. The Guitar Center can't get enough of them.

BG: The black one?
CM: Yes. They ordered 800 of them at the last trade show. Every time we made a thin bodied guitar, we said they don't sound that good, but I think a lot of the younger people, they have grown up plugging these things in or they have grown up with that thin body sound. So they aren't looking for that deep warm rich Rosewood deep bodied sound that somebody that is older.... and that is what they are used to hearing.

BG: How about the Koa?
CM: Another wood that is very difficult to get. First of all it has to be flamed. Nobody wants plain Koa. So 80 percent of the wood isn't acceptable from the customer's standpoint. It's hard to bend. It's very hard to bend the flamed sides and my understanding is a lot of the Koa in Hawaii only becomes available if for example a land owner gets permission to develop and then he gets permission to cut the Koa trees. With so many of these woods, I guess it's because it is so expensive, nobody took the time when they cut a tree down to replace it.

BG: And the new ones that are being grown have the wider grain pattern.
CM: Right they are going to force the growth for other purposes.

BG: You just recently started to get in to the Artist Guitars the past couple of years and your company has always been against it. What made you get started?
CM: Well the salesmen have always said we have got to find a way to align ourselves more formally with the artists that play our products. The story that I tell is that I said no because we always said no, but inside someday we are going to have to find a way to say yes. The way that we accomplished it was that I have always wanted to see Gene Autrey's guitar and someone said that it is in his museum in Los Angeles. When I was in L.A. visiting a friend, I said let's go to his museum. So we go over there and sure enough there it is. What really got me excited was the gift shop. There in the gift shop was all of these reproduction Gene Autrey memorabilia items. Gene Autrey lunch boxes, Gene Autrey pen knives and I wondered if they would warm up to us making a reproduction of Gene's D-45. I said to myself, when Gene was alive, he was a very wealthy man and we could not pay him enough money to get him excited, but I wonder if the way to approach him would be to say, we would love to do a reproduction, we will give you the first one for the museum, we'll give you a portion of the proceeds from the sales of the limited edition for your museum and he thought that was really cool. I talked to his wife and she said that the offer you made us was not acceptable. So we upped the ante in terms of how much we would give the museum. We made the deal and that has been the template now that we use because most of the artists that we deal with are successful enough they have enough money. They have charities that they care about. You know Clapton has his rehabilitation center and so every time we talk to them they're like, oh yeah a great idea. I get to keep one and then I can give the proceeds to the charity and it's in my name. They really warm up to it. So, in a round about way we do use endorsee's now.

BG: Martin was always no matter what - no way to endorsee's.
CM: I know, and everybody else was doing it and they were saying here, you want a free guitar, you want money? I just thought we're not going to do it that way. We are going to find a more gentlemanly way to approach this and I think we have. It is nice to make the connection, particularly as young people grow up, I hope that if they really get into guitar playing, they are going to follow the music backwards. They are going to find people playing Martins all the way back.

BG: You either play a Martin or you can't afford one.
CM: (Laughs)

BG: How about the electronics on the guitars? People have asked me why don't you put a pickup in that guitar and I tell them you're not cutting the wood on my guitar to put it in.
CM: The place we put a lot of electronics are in the X Series, 1 Series and the Road Series. The laminate sides are perfect for it. You can get in there with a router and you are not going to blow the sides out. Like the D-50, could you imagine saying, hey give me a Fishman Slider control on a D-50, it's not going to happen. The pickups are better today . We have had a great relationship with Fishman. That part of the business, the technology does change, it does improve.

BG: How about microphones. That's what I would do.
CM: The thing there is that you are very beholding to that perfect setup. Suppose you are on stage and you want to move around, it's an individual choice. One of the things that I have always said about amplifying an acoustic guitar is, the bones of the guitar are what counts. Good guitar, good pickup, good P.A., great sound. If any one of those things are bad, bad sound.

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