Martin Guitars Custom Shop Slope-Shouldered HD-28

An Acoustic Icon

Attention, all acoustic guitar aficionados! The Wildwood team is brimming with excitement about our latest collaboration with the Martin Custom Shop: a new slope-shoulder Custom Shop HD-28! Why are we so geeked? Well, two of our favorite things in the entire world are basking in the glorious sound of a great Martin and sharing that Martin-induced joy with our customers with exceptional value! Let’s take a closer look and see why this guitar has won our hearts in record time.

Awesome Adirondack Action

To cop a vintage-style tone, we asked the folks at Martin to equip this Martin with an Adirondack spruce top and 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.

Making a Great HD-28

The Martin HD-28 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. Speaking of heavenly things, we asked our friends at Martin to equip this guitar with forward-shifted Golden Era scalloped 5/16” bracing to maximize dynamic range and provide a truly inspirational playing experience. Though these guitars are still wooden cannons, this bracing configuration gives them a greater capacity for subtlety and nuance than you might expect from a muscle-bound dreadnought!

Feel the Joy

Playing a Custom Shop Martin is a singularly joyous experience, and we could not be happier to share that joy with you wonderful Wildwoodians. We know that the Custom Shop HD-28 will prove itself to be steadfast companions on your acoustic adventures, and we cannot wait to see how it inspires you along the way.