Looking down the list of interviews on this website, the name Chris Martin seems to crop-up awfully often. But there’s just no getting away from the importance of CF Martin guitars in the music industry, nor the relevance of Chris’s views, as the instruments and the industry continue to change. My excuse for adding this latest interview to the recent one from Music Trade News, is that it was written for players, rather than retailers or industry insiders. It appeared in issue 11 of Acoustic magazine in the UK..
 

INTERVIEW: CHRIS MARTIN

If you were offered any job in the acoustic guitar business, Chris Martin's would probably be the choice of many. He had a tough apprenticeship in the family business before taking over, in 1986, from his grandfather, and has had to steer the company back from difficult times - but who wouldn't want to be in charge of the world's most famous acoustic guitar maker?

Except that the day to day running of a business as big as Martin Guitars probably isn't that very different from the day to day running of any other industrial concern, so a couple of years ago, Martin rescinded his role as President of the company, appointed a professional manager to run the business and, today, has more of a blue sky role, with the title company Chairman. With a baby daughter to look after (Claire - already the owner of the sweetest acoustic guitar you could imagine, and already being talked of as the seventh generation of Martins to run the business - let's hope she doesn't decide she'd rather be a drummer!), Chris still watches over the revered manufacturer, runs the factory tours - and thinks a lot.

One of the things he must be thinking about is where does Martin go from here? For the last few years, it has ploughed a hugely successful furrow of superb re-issue models: arguably as good as any instruments Martin has ever made. But with supplies of traditional tonewoods drying-up, there are new materials that need investigating and the awkwardness of being the embodiment of tradition, yet simultaneously having to steer people toward new ideas.

So, on the one hand, Martin is making drop-dead gorgeous reissues, as traditional as you can get, while on the other, it is flirting with commendable silliness, like the absolutely off the wall Felix the Cat models - which probably don't go down too well in Hooterville, where there are probably still good ol' boys who swear that truss rods will never catch on, but which may point to the future.

We start by talking about the Martin re-issues. Is he happy with that level of focus on the past?

'Hey - why not? Everyone else is doing them,' he laughs. But it is a bit of a sore point, all the same. After all, there are companies out there re-issuing things they never issued in the first place - and a whole industry copying ideas Martin first had over 100 years ago.

'That's part of the thinking behind the museum that we have opened,' he adds. 'We always gave factory tours, but we did a terrible job of it and about telling people about our history. I do resent the fact a little bit that you have all these people out there who claim to reinvent the guitar - but it's a Dreadnought! I’m sorry, it's a copy, that’s all you’re doing - go make your own shape!' He's smiling (Chris Martin is a genuinely affable man - about as un-stuffy as you can get) but the point is made.

So just how far can Martin continue mining its heritage?

'Hey - what else am I going to do - sell the company?' he laughs - clearly in no mind to do any such thing. 'Have you seen the D-18 Authentic?'

This is replica guitar making carried out to the sort of degree that in any other business would have you consigned to group therapy to treat your Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. In the guitar business such fanaticism is regarded as a stroke of genius.

'It is as exact a replica of a pre-war D-18 as we can make today - including no adjustable truss rod! We're taking a risk here. There will be some warranty issues over time, we know that, but who better than us to do it? But the machinations we went through to make a guitar we used to make with our eyes closed 70 years ago, you wouldn't believe - it was incredible! The politics, the "Oh! Hide glue? We haven't used hide glue in 20 years!" And, "What do you mean, no adjustable truss rod?!"

'I said, well we used to do it and we are going to do it again. But it took us two or three years to build a guitar we used to build routinely, 70 years ago!'

And thus we enter into controversial territory. One school of thought suggests old Martins sound great because of the way they were made and what they were made from. The other insists it is because of the way the survivors have lived and breathed down the years. So, how does Chris Martin think the new ones compare? He reveals something truly fascinating, which suggests that nature, rather than nurture could be more important than many have supposed.

'You know, we built two initially. We made one as authentically as we could, with hide glue, and another as authentically as we could, with white glue - and the hide glue guitar sounds better. Everybody as sorta like, "Oh, my Goodness! It really is what you think it would be!" So there really does seems to be something about it'.

Then again, as he says - you simply can't discount what 70 years playing will do to a fine guitar.

'You know, I wish we had made Indian rosewood D-28s back in the '30s and just put them aside, so that we could make comparisons today. People talk about Stradivarius and say "Oh, its this and it's that about the construction". Well, yeah - but it's also something about 200 years. There is something about time.'

Which is all well and good, while you can still find supplies of the traditional tonewoods, Chris's forebears were using back in the 1930s. But the fact is, you can't.

‘You’re going to start seeing different materials on more expensive guitars as the more scarce woods get increasingly expensive and rare,' he says. 'It's just inevitable.'

You are also going to see some very weird and wacky ideas (like the aforementioned FeLiX II, which is almost an entirely 'new materials'; guitar) and the by now quite well established X Series models which, while most have solid Spruce tops, feature wood fibre composite backs and sides.)

In an interview a few years go, Chris told me how the X Series had evolved. As a sign of the shape of things to come, it bears repeating.

‘We started out using the high-pressure laminate on the top - we actually took a photograph of a D-45 top and had it custom made for us. But a lot of my colleagues and dealers said, it didn’t have the sort of sustain that we’re used to from a Martin. So then we put a spruce top on it and now the people that didn’t like the original one started to like it and it’s gone on from there. It’s become a platform for us. Here we had a guitar that didn't have a history, so we could have fun with them and experiment. They are getting a lot of buzz in the States and they’re a place for us to experiment and do some crazy things without people saying. “Oh my God, Chris has gone insane.” The fingerboards and bridges on some of them are paperboard products. They look just like ebony and they perform just like ebony, but they aren’t'.

But even before the X Series, Martin had been looking at ways to make affordable guitars.

‘It started with the Shenandoah - our first attempt at making an affordable Martin and we were blessed, ironically, by the fact that the Yen went up in value and the parts became so expensive it no longer was an affordable Martin guitar and that gave us the impetus to investigate mortise and tenon guitars and that has grown into what we like to call ‘entry level’ Martin guitars - even though I realise our customers will say a $1,000 Martin is still an expensive guitar. The X Series has done a lot of interesting things - not least it has allowed us to feel that it’s ok for Martin to make guitars out of other materials, as long as we make them to a high quality.

‘When we were first figuring out how to make them, we were sanding the rims in the same way we sanded wooden rims. But the high-pressure laminate is actually very delicate and the sandpaper was rough enough that, while it worked on wood, on the laminate it was chipping it - almost imperceptibly. One day I was in a meeting we were having to discuss the X Series and I was looking at these imperfections and I could see these almost microscopic chips where the side and the back met and I said, “Look at this. I don't like this”. It was a case of “look at what?” When they said I was being fanatical, I had to make the point that its ok for Martin to be fanatical and it made them go back and resolve the problem. And that's when I think everybody realised that, whatever the materials are, you have to make it Martin quality - you don't compromise, just because the materials are different’.

So are we going to see more up-market Martin guitars made from unusual materials? What about the experiments with cherry wood that Martin had undertaken a few years ago?

‘Its either going to happen or you're going to see fewer guitars. What's happening right now with mahogany is that we're ordering mahogany for the future but we’re getting it hand to mouth. The vendors are saying they cannot guarantee anything in the future - "oh, and by the way, the order you need now, we can send you three quarters of what you wanted and the price is going up". And that happens every time we order. East Indian rosewood is still ok - they are moving from natural to plantation-grown wood and the grain is wider and you can see minerals in it, but the availability is there and it’s a question of taking what you can get.

'Nobody likes those little white mineral spots in it, I know, and that comes from the use of fertiliser in the plantation. The fertiliser gets drawn up into the wood and precipitates out - but, hey, it's Indian rosewood and it’s the real deal!’

Another material Chris has mentioned in the past is cedar, as a substitute for mahogany in neck construction. How has Martin been getting on with that?

‘Everybody who works with mahogany has discovered that cedar is a pretty good alternative - not just in the guitar business but also architects and furniture makers. But that is how things are. There's no Brazilian rosewood at all, that's totally shut down. We were getting some from Spain, but we haven't had a shipment out of there for two years.’

So what do you use for the top-end Martins?

‘We’re finishing out some of the limited editions that we started a couple of years ago, like the D100. I have a cache of probably 200 sets that use for one-offs, Larry Robinson (the Californian inlay artist) inlaid guitars for shows, but other than that, well, that's pretty much it’.

What about projects for plantation-grown woods? Has there really been no progress on this?

‘That may be an issue for Claire, or maybe even her offspring, but not for us. We are getting some Madagascar rosewood in, which is very nice - very, very nice - and you can get Koa. But there are still so many problems. We recently had a discussion with Greenpeace about the clear-cutting they are doing up in Alaska, to ship spruce over to Asia to make housing. Greenpeace’s point was, they wanted us to talk to the native people, because it’s they who are in charge of the land and say to them “It's your heritage”. But they have boats the size of oil tankers and they process the wood on-board - these are factory ships. Greenpeace’s point was that if they got music industry people up there, particularly me, because of this seven generations thing, we could say to them “if you manage this thing, you can pass this on to your kids”. The point is - manage it. It’s renewable and sustainable if you think about how to manage it. If you wait too long, it may be too late. They showed an aerial photograph and the clear-cutting is pretty substantial. I didn't realise that - I thought they were managing the spruce forests, but the aren’t.’

Much has been made, in the guitar business, of the way that Bob Taylor revolutionised not just the feel of the acoustic guitar, but the way it as made. Indeed, Chris is on record as having said he credits Taylor with having pushed production standards. Could he elaborate on that?

‘When my Dad ran the business, there was an attempt to utilise more sophisticated woodworking machinery, but the volume is in table tops and seat bottoms and the machinery is designed for that purpose. When you're talking about three dimensions, like a guitar, that gets very, very expensive. So my Dad would go to a woodworking show, and ask them if such and such a machine would make necks and they'd say - yes, for $4 million. So he tried to get machines designed locally but they never ever worked and he gave up. We took a step backwards and bought more drawknives. So what I meant was I’ll give Bob credit for realising that a three dimensional metal working machine, if it could cut metal, could surely cut wood, and he was right. So I have to give Bob credit from a production standpoint'.

‘But we have now moved beyond that and we have bought some massive three dimensional woodcarving machines from Japan and they have been very successful, too, but the area that we've used the machines for is the parts. Now the parts are made to a more uniform standard, that makes putting the guitars together so much easier. Maybe in Claire's time somebody will invent a ‘putting the guitar together machine’ but not for now. They are all assembled by hand, still.

'But that's why we take people on tours. Usually, I get halfway through a tour and someone will say, "Now I know why they are so expensive”, because they see the huge amount of work that goes into making one. My feeling is, not that I would be scared of letting it go if we came up with a machine that could make guitars, but that I want to make sure the people who work for us are fulfilled. We’re not in it for the money it’s a very precious thing that we have and we have to cherish it'.

If you were offered any job in the acoustic guitar business, Chris Martin's would probably be the choice of many. He had a tough apprenticeship in the family business before taking over, in 1986, from his grandfather, and has had to steer the company back from difficult times - but who wouldn't want to be in charge of the world's most famous acoustic guitar maker?

Except that the day to day running of a business as big as Martin Guitars probably isn't that very different from the day to day running of any other industrial concern, so a couple of years ago, Martin rescinded his role as President of the company, appointed a professional manager to run the business and, today, has more of a blue sky role, with the title company Chairman. With a baby daughter to look after (Claire - already the owner of the sweetest acoustic guitar you could imagine, and already being talked of as the seventh generation of Martins to run the business - let's hope she doesn't decide she'd rather be a drummer!), Chris still watches over the revered manufacturer, runs the factory tours - and thinks a lot.

One of the things he must be thinking about is where does Martin go from here? For the last few years, it has ploughed a hugely successful furrow of superb re-issue models: arguably as good as any instruments Martin has ever made. But with supplies of traditional tonewoods drying-up, there are new materials that need investigating and the awkwardness of being the embodiment of tradition, yet simultaneously having to steer people toward new ideas.

So, on the one hand, Martin is making drop-dead gorgeous reissues, as traditional as you can get, while on the other, it is flirting with commendable silliness, like the absolutely off the wall Felix the Cat models - which probably don't go down too well in Hooterville, where there are probably still good ol' boys who swear that truss rods will never catch on, but which may point to the future.

We start by talking about the Martin re-issues. Is he happy with that level of focus on the past?

'Hey - why not? Everyone else is doing them,' he laughs. But it is a bit of a sore point, all the same. After all, there are companies out there re-issuing things they never issued in the first place - and a whole industry copying ideas Martin first had over 100 years ago.

'That's part of the thinking behind the museum that we have opened,' he adds. 'We always gave factory tours, but we did a terrible job of it and about telling people about our history. I do resent the fact a little bit that you have all these people out there who claim to reinvent the guitar - but it's a Dreadnought! I’m sorry, it's a copy, that’s all you’re doing - go make your own shape!' He's smiling (Chris Martin is a genuinely affable man - about as un-stuffy as you can get) but the point is made.

So just how far can Martin continue mining its heritage?

'Hey - what else am I going to do - sell the company?' he laughs - clearly in no mind to do any such thing. 'Have you seen the D-18 Authentic?'

This is replica guitar making carried out to the sort of degree that in any other business would have you consigned to group therapy to treat your Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. In the guitar business such fanaticism is regarded as a stroke of genius.

'It is as exact a replica of a pre-war D-18 as we can make today - including no adjustable truss rod! We're taking a risk here. There will be some warranty issues over time, we know that, but who better than us to do it? But the machinations we went through to make a guitar we used to make with our eyes closed 70 years ago, you wouldn't believe - it was incredible! The politics, the "Oh! Hide glue? We haven't used hide glue in 20 years!" And, "What do you mean, no adjustable truss rod?!"

'I said, well we used to do it and we are going to do it again. But it took us two or three years to build a guitar we used to build routinely, 70 years ago!'

And thus we enter into controversial territory. One school of thought suggests old Martins sound great because of the way they were made and what they were made from. The other insists it is because of the way the survivors have lived and breathed down the years. So, how does Chris Martin think the new ones compare? He reveals something truly fascinating, which suggests that nature, rather than nurture could be more important than many have supposed.

'You know, we built two initially. We made one as authentically as we could, with hide glue, and another as authentically as we could, with white glue - and the hide glue guitar sounds better. Everybody as sorta like, "Oh, my Goodness! It really is what you think it would be!" So there really does seems to be something about it'.

Then again, as he says - you simply can't discount what 70 years playing will do to a fine guitar.

'You know, I wish we had made Indian rosewood D-28s back in the '30s and just put them aside, so that we could make comparisons today. People talk about Stradivarius and say "Oh, its this and it's that about the construction". Well, yeah - but it's also something about 200 years. There is something about time.'

Which is all well and good, while you can still find supplies of the traditional tonewoods, Chris's forebears were using back in the 1930s. But the fact is, you can't.

‘You’re going to start seeing different materials on more expensive guitars as the more scarce woods get increasingly expensive and rare,' he says. 'It's just inevitable.'

You are also going to see some very weird and wacky ideas (like the aforementioned FeLiX II, which is almost an entirely 'new materials'; guitar) and the by now quite well established X Series models which, while most have solid Spruce tops, feature wood fibre composite backs and sides.)

In an interview a few years go, Chris told me how the X Series had evolved. As a sign of the shape of things to come, it bears repeating.

‘We started out using the high-pressure laminate on the top - we actually took a photograph of a D-45 top and had it custom made for us. But a lot of my colleagues and dealers said, it didn’t have the sort of sustain that we’re used to from a Martin. So then we put a spruce top on it and now the people that didn’t like the original one started to like it and it’s gone on from there. It’s become a platform for us. Here we had a guitar that didn't have a history, so we could have fun with them and experiment. They are getting a lot of buzz in the States and they’re a place for us to experiment and do some crazy things without people saying. “Oh my God, Chris has gone insane.” The fingerboards and bridges on some of them are paperboard products. They look just like ebony and they perform just like ebony, but they aren’t'.

But even before the X Series, Martin had been looking at ways to make affordable guitars.

‘It started with the Shenandoah - our first attempt at making an affordable Martin and we were blessed, ironically, by the fact that the Yen went up in value and the parts became so expensive it no longer was an affordable Martin guitar and that gave us the impetus to investigate mortise and tenon guitars and that has grown into what we like to call ‘entry level’ Martin guitars - even though I realise our customers will say a $1,000 Martin is still an expensive guitar. The X Series has done a lot of interesting things - not least it has allowed us to feel that it’s ok for Martin to make guitars out of other materials, as long as we make them to a high quality.

‘When we were first figuring out how to make them, we were sanding the rims in the same way we sanded wooden rims. But the high-pressure laminate is actually very delicate and the sandpaper was rough enough that, while it worked on wood, on the laminate it was chipping it - almost imperceptibly. One day I was in a meeting we were having to discuss the X Series and I was looking at these imperfections and I could see these almost microscopic chips where the side and the back met and I said, “Look at this. I don't like this”. It was a case of “look at what?” When they said I was being fanatical, I had to make the point that its ok for Martin to be fanatical and it made them go back and resolve the problem. And that's when I think everybody realised that, whatever the materials are, you have to make it Martin quality - you don't compromise, just because the materials are different’.

So are we going to see more up-market Martin guitars made from unusual materials? What about the experiments with cherry wood that Martin had undertaken a few years ago?

‘Its either going to happen or you're going to see fewer guitars. What's happening right now with mahogany is that we're ordering mahogany for the future but we’re getting it hand to mouth. The vendors are saying they cannot guarantee anything in the future - "oh, and by the way, the order you need now, we can send you three quarters of what you wanted and the price is going up". And that happens every time we order. East Indian rosewood is still ok - they are moving from natural to plantation-grown wood and the grain is wider and you can see minerals in it, but the availability is there and it’s a question of taking what you can get.

'Nobody likes those little white mineral spots in it, I know, and that comes from the use of fertiliser in the plantation. The fertiliser gets drawn up into the wood and precipitates out - but, hey, it's Indian rosewood and it’s the real deal!’

Another material Chris has mentioned in the past is cedar, as a substitute for mahogany in neck construction. How has Martin been getting on with that?

‘Everybody who works with mahogany has discovered that cedar is a pretty good alternative - not just in the guitar business but also architects and furniture makers. But that is how things are. There's no Brazilian rosewood at all, that's totally shut down. We were getting some from Spain, but we haven't had a shipment out of there for two years.’

So what do you use for the top-end Martins?

‘We’re finishing out some of the limited editions that we started a couple of years ago, like the D100. I have a cache of probably 200 sets that use for one-offs, Larry Robinson (the Californian inlay artist) inlaid guitars for shows, but other than that, well, that's pretty much it’.

What about projects for plantation-grown woods? Has there really been no progress on this?

‘That may be an issue for Claire, or maybe even her offspring, but not for us. We are getting some Madagascar rosewood in, which is very nice - very, very nice - and you can get Koa. But there are still so many problems. We recently had a discussion with Greenpeace about the clear-cutting they are doing up in Alaska, to ship spruce over to Asia to make housing. Greenpeace’s point was, they wanted us to talk to the native people, because it’s they who are in charge of the land and say to them “It's your heritage”. But they have boats the size of oil tankers and they process the wood on-board - these are factory ships. Greenpeace’s point was that if they got music industry people up there, particularly me, because of this seven generations thing, we could say to them “if you manage this thing, you can pass this on to your kids”. The point is - manage it. It’s renewable and sustainable if you think about how to manage it. If you wait too long, it may be too late. They showed an aerial photograph and the clear-cutting is pretty substantial. I didn't realise that - I thought they were managing the spruce forests, but the aren’t.’

Much has been made, in the guitar business, of the way that Bob Taylor revolutionised not just the feel of the acoustic guitar, but the way it as made. Indeed, Chris is on record as having said he credits Taylor with having pushed production standards. Could he elaborate on that?

‘When my Dad ran the business, there was an attempt to utilise more sophisticated woodworking machinery, but the volume is in table tops and seat bottoms and the machinery is designed for that purpose. When you're talking about three dimensions, like a guitar, that gets very, very expensive. So my Dad would go to a woodworking show, and ask them if such and such a machine would make necks and they'd say - yes, for $4 million. So he tried to get machines designed locally but they never ever worked and he gave up. We took a step backwards and bought more drawknives. So what I meant was I’ll give Bob credit for realising that a three dimensional metal working machine, if it could cut metal, could surely cut wood, and he was right. So I have to give Bob credit from a production standpoint'.

‘But we have now moved beyond that and we have bought some massive three dimensional woodcarving machines from Japan and they have been very successful, too, but the area that we've used the machines for is the parts. Now the parts are made to a more uniform standard, that makes putting the guitars together so much easier. Maybe in Claire's time somebody will invent a ‘putting the guitar together machine’ but not for now. They are all assembled by hand, still.

'But that's why we take people on tours. Usually, I get halfway through a tour and someone will say, "Now I know why they are so expensive”, because they see the huge amount of work that goes into making one. My feeling is, not that I would be scared of letting it go if we came up with a machine that could make guitars, but that I want to make sure the people who work for us are fulfilled. We’re not in it for the money it’s a very precious thing that we have and we have to cherish it'.

Ends.

© 2006 Gary Cooper