Martin Guitars D-28 Authentic 1937 – VTS

The Real McCoy

Attention, acoustic guitar-loving Wildwoodians! We have a truly delectable morsel for you to feast your eyes upon today: the Authentic Series 1937 D-28 by Martin Guitars!

Old-School Cool

Martin puts these delightful D-28s together with hot hide-glue, a protein-based adhesive that provides the strongest possible connection between the two pieces. They also hand-scallop each and every brace! This process is time-consuming, and it requires painstaking attention to detail, but it's worth it, because it lends their Authentic series guitars Golden-Era levels of resonance and sustain.

They only use the hide glue on good pieces of wood, too! These awesome Authentic D-28s come equipped with solid Adirondack spruce tops and bracing and stellar solid Guatemalan rosewood backs and sides, a classic tonewood combination that never fails to impress everyone within earshot. Adirondack spruce has more headroom and dynamic range than the more-common Sitka variety, and it also has a sweeter, woodier overall tonality. When you combine this stellar spruce tone with the piano-like richness imparted by the rosewood back and sides, the sound is the stuff of our wildest, most feverish acoustic dreams!

Essence of VTS

After selecting the choicest cuts of wood, the masterminds at Martin age the top using their patented Vintage Tone System, or VTS. The VTS is a sophisticated thermochemical process that is similar to torrefaction but more involved. Basically, to torrefaction works like this: you put the wood in an oxygen-free chamber under atmospheric pressure, and heat it. This sucks the moisture out of the wood and causes various biopolymers like cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, which makes the wood more solid and stable.

Martin's Vintage Tone Process takes the torrefaction process one step further. The acoustic wizards of Nazareth, Pennsylvania studied the chemical composition of various iconic Martins from the past, then figured out how to reverse-engineer modern wood to mirror that classic wood chemistry by using the torrefaction process I mentioned above. So, if you put the Adirondack spruce top on this 1937 Authentic Series D-28 under a microscope, it looks almost identical to the pre-war dreadnought that inspired it!

Together in Harmony

The VTS system and D-28s go together like Lennon and McCarty! Drier wood equals a warmer, clearer sound with a more focused frequency response, so there's less flub and fat and more muscle, so to speak. When you give the already-clear, sonorous voice of the Adirondack top this vintage treatment, it makes a D-28 sound like the dreadnought of your dreams: open, warm, and rich, with plenty of clarity and a ridiculously wide dynamic range of expression.

We are proud to present such an unprecedented instrument to our exceptional customer, and we invite you to experience the magic of the prewar Martin sound by taking one of these Authentic acoustics for a spin!