C.F. Martin & Co.

The great American guitar company. There are many wonderful guitars today & people often ask us who makes the best guitar. The answer to that is a personal choice that can only be answered by the individual player & his or her tastes. However, after years of playing & handling the finest guitars made in this world I can say that no one makes a better guitar than the folks at C.F. Martin. The X, 15 & 16 series guitars are extremely high quality & reasonably priced. The new 1 Series will surely become the benchmark for all solid wood American made acoustics. The Standard, Vintage, Limited Editions & Signature models are still the standard against which all other guitars are judged!

It is said that in the 1850s the Martin company developed one of its best technological innovations for the guitar, the X-bracing system. As a matter of fact C. F. Martin did not apply for a patent on X-bracing and his contemporaries also used it. In the 1850s the X-bracing could be found on the instruments of several makers, all German immigrants and known to each other. So there is no evidence of who in fact invented X-bracing. But the Martin company was the one to make use of X-bracing on a large scale and all of its guitars. The musical and structural integrity of an acoustic guitar is a balance between the need to allow the soundboard of the guitar to resonate freely for acoustic purposes and the compensation needed for maintaining structural integrity over the long term.

In the beginning of the 19th century the guitar was still being developed on both sides of the Atlantic. Until the 1850s ladder bracing was common in guitar construction, struts of wood being glued to the underside of the top of the guitar perpendicular to the strings’ direction. From the 1860s on, fan bracing became standard in Europe, but Martin and other American builders, most of them forgotten today like Schmidt & Maul and Stumcke, as well as Tilton and Washburn, used X-bracing instead . The X-bracing might be considered less delicate sounding with gut strings but it prepared the American guitar for what would emerge in the first quarter of the 20th century: steel strings on guitars.

The growing popularity of the guitar in the early 1900s, fueled by the growing popularity of folk music and country and western music, led to a demand for louder and more percussive guitars. This led to many companies beginning to string their guitars with metal instead of catgut. These became known as steel-string guitars, and Martin began concentrating on this type of guitar by 1921.

The company’s reputation and production continued to grow. Forays into mandolin making in the late 1890s and ukulele making in the 1920s greatly contributed to their expansion, and by 1928 they were making over 5000 instruments per year. Remaining a family-owned business, the company employed a relatively small number of highly-trained craftsmen making instruments primarily by hand. This limited production capacity, and by the early 1960s Martin guitars were back-ordered by as long as three years. In 1964 they opened a new plant which is still the primary Martin production facility.

C.F. Martin & Co.

The C.F. Martin & Company is a US guitar manufacturer established in 1833 by Christian Frederick Martin. Martin is highly regarded for its steel-string guitars, and is a leading mass manufacturer of flattop acoustics, with models that retail for thousands of dollars and vintage instruments that often fetch six figures at resale. The company has also made several models of electric guitars and electric basses.

The company?s headquarters and primary factory are in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, located in the Lehigh Valley region of the state. It also manufactures instruments in Mexico. By way of expansion, in the year 1900 Martin produced 182 instruments. In the year 2000 that figure had risen to 24,084.