This factory keeps on strumming

I was coming back to the guitar after more than 25 years, visiting my local music store time and again, picking up instruments and strumming the E chord central to my extremely limited repertoire, which dated back to when I played in teenage garage bands.

From the literature I'd gathered, I read that many of the finest acoustic guitars are made in the United States: Gibson in Montana, Taylor in California. But it was the Martins, made in eastern Pennsylvania, that sang to me.

C.F. Martin & Co. has been in the hands of one family since 1833. Clearly there was a reason for this longevity. Over the years, the Martins had produced a great product, the choice of major performers who helped bring the guitar to the forefront of popular music, especially from the 1960s on: Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, and Mary), Bob Shane and Nick Reynolds (of the Kingston Trio), Eric Clapton unplugged (that definitive performance on MTV), Willie Nelson (yes, that battered instrument with its famous cavern), and on and on.

The list is virtually endless. If a famous musician played guitar, he or she played a Martin at some point. Even Roy Rogers and Gene Autry played Martins.

So I determined to take one of the free tours C.F. Martin & Co. hosts at its factory in Nazareth, Pa., to see how craftspeople put together these instruments.

The factory is easily accessible via state highways north from Interstate 78 or south from Interstate 80 in eastern Pennsylvania, just west of the New Jersey border.

On the tours, which leave at 1 p.m. on weekdays, guides walk visitors through an operation that produces 220 instruments daily, from $600 models made principally of composites to special editions of classic rosewood, mahogany, ebony, and spruce that cost upwards of $10,000.

Immediately apparent is a level of care that transcends the price of the instrument. Some work is computerized, but the vast majority is done by hand. With a sense of wonder, I observed the meticulous care of these craftspeople.

"It takes three months to make a guitar," the guide said, pointing out, for example, that every time a step in the process called for gluing - which was often - the instrument had to sit for 45 minutes before it could be worked on again.

Craftspeople serve as quality controllers for the work done before reaching their station, then carefully check the quality of their own work before passing it on.

There are processes for heating and bending the wood for the sides, bracing the soundboard, cutting the sound hole, meticulously placing mother-of-pearl pieces in the rosette that circles the sound hole, fitting and gluing the edge bindings, lacquering, buffing, and so on.

"When visitors see all the personal care that goes into making a Martin guitar, they understand why they cost what they do," says C.F. "Chris" Martin IV, the latest in the line of descendants who have run the company for about 170 years.

Christian Frederick Martin Sr., the progenitor of the line, emigrated to New York in 1833, when a dispute among crafts guilds in the Saxony region of his German homeland prevented him from plying his craft.

In 1838, Martin relocated his operation from New York's Lower East Side to the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania. The company moved into its present facility on the outskirts of Nazareth in the mid-1960s, when the American love affair with the guitar had reached new heights.

Page: 1 | 2