Marty Lanham - Nashville Guitar Company
Californian Marty Lanham moved to Nashville in the 1970s to play banjo professionally and start his repair and restoration career in George Gruhn's thriving shop. Since that time he has become a celebrated banjo and guitar maker and a world class repair and restoration specialist. I've chosen Marty to build 12 and 14 fret dreadnoughts with the very last of my best Brazilian rosewood and Adirondack spruce dreadnought sets.
Coming Soon: "C.F. Marty" is building another custom 12 fret D for me using the last of my best Brazilian Rosewood and Adirondack Spruce sets. This guitar will be on display at the 2013 Healdsburg Guitar Festival this coming August.
New Prewar style custom D-28 (11186)
The long-awaited custom 14 fret D is finally here! This is the first of four instruments that Marty Lanham will be building for me, using the last of my best Brazilian rosewood dreadnought sized sets and Adirondack spruce that I've been saving for several years. The Adirondack spruce top for this guitar is the stiffest Artist Grade + top that I had gotten since 2001. This kind of stiff top is necessary to counteract the tendency for advanced X-brace rosewood Ds to be overly bassy. This top provides a very balanced and huge bluegrass voice for this guitar. The Brazilian Rosewood set is one that I've had since the late 19990s. It is dense, very tight and straight grain, brick red in color, and has a fabulous tap tone. The inspiration for this guitar is the 1937 Martin D-28, the most desireable year for a vintage Martin dreadnought. While generally styled like a 1937 D-28, I let Marty make a few stylistic changes in the aesthetics, such as the ebony headstock overlay with his pearl inlaid logo, beautifully cut unslotted abalone fingerboard diamonds with curved edges, Wood soundhole purflings, Pearl dot ivoroid bridge pins, and the slanted pin placement in the bridge (similar to Collings) that keeps the string angle over the saddle constant for all of the strings. All the other cosmetic details are what you would expect from a 1930s Martin D-28, including Waverly 4060 tuners. Like a 1930s D-28, the nut width is 1 3/4" at the nut, the neck profile is a modified vintage V-shape, and the string spread at the bridge is 2 5/16". Marty's sure, experienced hands have made these choice materials into one of the finest vintage style dreadnoughts that I have ever played. I am supplying a heavy duty Ameritage D case with this guitar.
$10,750
