Martin Guitars

I started playing the guitar when I was about 16 years old. Unfortunately, I never took lessons so I've learned lots of things very badly. I do know the sound of a good guitar and I was awed yesterday during my visit to the Martin Guitar factory in Nazareth, PA.

First of all they give you a real factory tour. You get to walk the floor of the factory and the workers stop and chat. It's an amazing process which takes about 4 months for an instrument to get produced and is a combination of very high tech stuff and some painfully simple hand work. At the end of the tour they let you try out their guitars both low end and high end. I was partial to the $5,000 ones but could never see anything that would justify buying one unless I was a professional musician. I particularly liked the Johnny Cash signature guitar (black body). It had a deep resonant tone that was really different than the Elvis Presley signature model.