Description: News from the Shop
Over the course of a mere fifteen years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, C. F. Martin Sr., America’s first major guitar maker and the founder of C. F. Martin & Co., transformed the European guitar into a new instrument. The guitar he invented during this remarkably short period of time had all of the design and construction features that would define the iconic American flat-top guitar.
Martin emigrated to New York from his native Germany in 1833, where he began crafting elegant guitars based on the model of his Viennese mentor, Johann Georg Stauffer. But within a few years, Martin came under the influence of Spanish guitarists who were all the rage in concert halls, and started to bring Spanish elements into his own guitars. By 1843 Martin had designed the revolutionary X-bracing method of bracing the soundboard of his guitars that set the stage for the emergence of a distinctly American
In December of 2017, Vintage Instruments in Philadelphia mounted an exhibit of 35 Martin Guitars made in New York and Nazareth from c.1834 until c.1867, including several of the earliest known C. F. Martin instruments. We are now offering for sale a selection of these fine guitars which includes fine examples from each stage of Martin’s development – the original Austro-German Style of guitars he produced upon his arrival in America, his intermediate Spanish Style, and finally the earliest examples of the m