Martin Guitars Custom Shop D-45

The Top of the Line

Wildwoodians, is there anything more luxurious than a Martin D-45? It's the Roll-Royce of acoustic guitars, designed to look good enough to make the other acoustic players on your block green with jealous rage with plenty of muscle under the hood. It comes decked out with all of Martin's top-of-of-the-line cosmetic appointments, and it's an absolute sonic titan to boot. Let's take a look under the hood and see what makes this Custom Shop iteration so special!

Awesome Adirondack Action

To cop some killer tone, we asked the folks at Martin to equip this Martin with an Adirondack spruce top and Adirondack bracing. It’s no secret that we love Adirondack spruce to an unhealthy degree here at Wildwood, so let’s dive into the reasons for our obsession with this stellar tonewood.

Adirondack spruce produces a plethora of pleasing timbres. From the get-go, it gives the guitar a woody, percussive attack with piano-like roundness and an exceptionally wide dynamic range. You can coax plenty of different sounds out of a guitar with an Adirondack top simply by altering your right-hand technique, so it really facilitates expressive playing!

Part of the reason for this is the otherworldly amount of headroom that Adirondack spruce offers. Every acoustic guitar’s top has a point at which it cannot get any louder. Once you hit that point, the top is “maxed-out” and playing harder yields more compression rather than more volume.

For guitars with Adirondack tops, that point is much, much higher than normal. So, you can really hit hard with your right hand without losing any clarity. Think of it like this: if electric guitar players prize amps that can “go to eleven,” acoustic guitarists prize Adirondack spruce because it can go to quadruple-fortissimo. Nevertheless, it is still quite expressive and open-sounding at lower volumes.

D-45 Flavor

The Martin D-45 and Adirondack spruce are a match made in acoustic guitar heaven. Adirondack’s natural clarity brings focus and precision to the enormous, piano-like resonance of the rosewood back and sides, making the guitar sound like a wooden cannon capable of leveling entire cities with its awe-inspiring acoustic power. Though these guitars are still wooden cannons, the scalloped forward-shifted braces give them a greater capacity for subtlety and nuance than you might expect from a muscle-bound dreadnought!

Elegance and Grace

We have no doubt that this supercharged Custom Shop D-45 will deliver monstrous Martin tone and looks that kill. We invite you to take it for a spin and discover its elegance and grace firsthand, and we have no doubt it will inspire you to embark on all kinds of exciting acoustic adventures!