My shopping cart
Your cart is currently empty.
Continue ShoppingGet Your Hands on the Martin Custom Shop Expert Guatemalen Rosewood with Stage 1 Aging
Watch our Youtube video for a demo and the review!
Today we are reviewing a Martin Custom Shop Expert Guitar that is
based on the HD 28, but really, it's a custom HD 28!
Acoustic vibes Music is a Custom Shop Expert dealer, which means we get
a variety of custom shop features that ordinary martin dealers can't access.
One of them is the stage one aging on this guitar.
Features
It's a spruce top, and we used Guatemalan rosewood for back and sides.
This is actually a set of Guatemalan rosewood that I picked out before the pandemic. Martin had factory tours where dealers could go pick out Woods.
So the stage one aging Martin has guitars in the lineup that are aged.
They've got the 18 authentic age, they get the 28 authentic aged, but they're more of a stage two or three aging which has a little heavier, distressing.
Stage one aging is basically like if you found a guitar from the fifties under your bed and had never been played, but it had seen the effects of time.
So I love the way they do this.
It's just very natural, very comfortable. The top finish sort of has the checking
of light checking that you'd see in a vintage guitar. The edges of the fretboard or rounded down. There's a little bit of wear on the back. Not too much. The tuners are antique. They sort of have that patina
that an older guitar would have. This guitar features waverly tuners
It has the old style Martin logo, It's got the herringbone trim.
I also like how they age the bridge pins and the saddle, which is a drop in saddle.
It's not a cut through saddle. It's just really wonderful detailing,
just a very comfortable with our.
This also has the modified oval neck shape,
which seems to be the number one preference for most of our customers.
And so we selected that neck shape with this particular guitar.
Also, one of the features I like about this guitar is this got the skull scalloped bracing. So it's forward shifted. Sitka spruce bracing. That's been scalloped like the HD models. So it gives you a really nice variety of not only subtle tonality,
but also you can really dig into it. This guitar's a six spruce top,
so people usually think the sickest. Bruce has some limitations on volume and how hard you can play it, but the way this one's built it,
it's got headroom to spare. So you can really use this for bluegrass flat picking.
It's going to hold its own in a in a bluegrass setting or with other instruments that
would compete with it. You pick this guitar up and it just feels like a vintage guitar,
but you get all the advantages of modern construction and it just has a tremendous, powerful, wonderful projection. If you enjoyed this blog post or our youtube videos, please subscribe! And check out the rest of our Martin collection here!