CF Martin & Co.

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CF Martin & Co., Inc.

logo
legal form family-run under private law
founding 1833
Seat Nazareth, Pennsylvania
management Christian Frederick Martin IV.
Number of employees about 500
Branch Musical instruments
Website www.martinguitar.com
www.martin-gitarren.de

Martin 00-28 1907

CF Martin & Co., Inc. ( Martin Guitars for short ) is a plucked instrument company with a focus on the manufacture of high-quality and top-quality guitars from Nazareth (Pennsylvania) in the USA . The company was founded in 1833 by the German émigré Christian Friedrich Martin (1796–1873, later called Christian Frederick Martin) and is still family-run in the sixth generation by Christian Frederick Martin IV, who has been CEO since 1986.

The company is known worldwide for the quality of its products and innovations and sets the style for the instrument class of western guitars, which are commonly known in German as western guitars . The company history of CF Martin & Co. is a comparable example of other successful start-ups by European immigrants, particularly by Germans such as Steinway & Sons , Boeing , in the industrial history of the United States.

Founding time

The founder, Christian Friedrich Martin Senior, was born on January 31, 1796 in Markneukirchen . He started out as an apprentice to his father, the carpenter Johann Georg Martin. At the age of 15 he went to Vienna to complete an apprenticeship with Johann Georg Stauffer in what was probably the best Viennese guitar manufacturer at the time . Christian Friedrich made it to the foreman in his workshop due to his skill. His marriage to Ottilie Lucia Kühle, daughter of a Viennese carpenter and instrument maker, apparently prompted him to leave Stauffer because he found a new job in his father-in-law's workshop. He stayed in Vienna for a total of 14 years, after which he returned to his hometown and opened his own shop. He got into a turbulent situation because the guild of violin makers in the city of Neukirchen (later “Markneukirchen”) had lodged a complaint with the King of Saxony . The violin makers claimed that the carpenters Carl Friedrich Jacob and Carl Gottlob Wild made guitars without permission ; they are not members of the violin makers' guild, whose members alone have the right to manufacture all kinds of stringed instruments . In the court files from 1832, Christian Friedrich Martin's father is already mentioned as a manufacturer of guitars:

“As a similar complaint from the local violin making trade against the carpenter Johann Georg Martin all here, the latter, by means of the fol. 26. of the accompanying acts, sub. M. vid. 157. the highest rescripts that the guitars have been manufactured ... "

Christian Friedrich emigrated to New York in September 1833 . This decision is attributed to the difficulties described above. It is documented that the violin makers' guild had initiated at least three official and judicial proceedings against guitar makers since 1806. The successes of the procedures varied, but as a long-standing state of uncertainty must have exerted great pressure on the manufacturers of plucked instruments who did not belong to the violin makers' guild.

  • The old factory on North Street

  • The new factory

Christian Friedrich Martin opened his guitar manufacturing business in New York that same year . In the beginning he ran a music shop, which is quite common even by today's standards, where you could buy guitars as well as wind and string instruments , strings , sheet music and accessories. He made guitars to order. He worked with a number of music teachers, wholesalers and other partners to sell them, but also to manufacture the guitars themselves. That is why many models from this period are labeled Martin & Schatz or Martin & Coupa . Martin's guitars enjoyed an excellent reputation during the time he was in New York, which quickly got around among interested parties.

1838 Martin sold his business in New York and moved the factory to Nazareth ( Pennsylvania ). The focus of his work now finally shifted to the production of high-quality guitars.

After this move, the business transformed into a business with about 20 employees and grew steadily until the first factory opened on North Street in 1859 . CF Martin died on February 16, 1873, leaving behind a successful guitar building company.

Guitar making technology and innovations

Earliest guitar with X-bracing (1842)
X bracing

In the 1840s, CF Martin Sr. perfected the X-Bracing , which enables increased stability and resilience of the ceiling . The X-Bracing (glued-on strips on the inside of the body top) is still considered to be one of the best bracing patterns and is used worldwide primarily on guitars with steel strings. Today it is generally claimed that Martin invented this form of bracing. However, it can be proven that "X-Bracing" was used in the 1840s, i.e. at the same time by other guitar makers who were of German origin and known to one another, such as Schmidt, Maul and Stumcke. The "X-Bracing" has not been patented. If his authorship is also attributed to Christian Friedrich Martin, the real authorship will probably no longer be clear.

With the X-Bracing, the Martin guitars were unwittingly prepared for a development that began around the turn of the century. As the guitar became more popular as a folk instrument in the United States, the problem that the guitar was generally too quiet compared to other instruments became more pressing. Guitar players struggled to make themselves heard against the much louder instruments mandolin , violin and banjo . Inspired by banjo and mandolin players, guitarists began to string their instruments , which were actually designed for gut strings , with mandolin strings in order to achieve a better volume. This development was not hidden from Martin. However, the instruments were not able to cope with the higher tension of the metal strings in the long run. Martin took up the development, however, by adapting the guitars constructively to the changed requirements. The guitars with body size "000" were intended for use with both gut and steel strings for a certain time. As early as the first decade of the 20th century, Martin's focus was on guitars with steel strings.

In 1916 Martin produced the first dreadnought guitars, for a long time the largest design for a guitar. After initial difficulties, this design was accepted worldwide and is now a kind of trademark of Martin & Co. The "Dreadnought" with the neck at the fourteenth fret is probably the most common design among acoustic steel-string guitars today. Almost every manufacturer of acoustic steel-string guitars copies this design, sometimes with minor variations, sometimes in a way that completely matches the Martin dreadnought.

Martin started building guitars in 1929, the neck of which only merged into the body of the guitar at the fourteenth fret. Previously, a transition of the guitar neck at the twelfth fret was common. The transition at the fourteenth fret should allow the player to more easily reach the frets beyond the twelfth fret. The innovation was also based on the advice of the banjo player Perry Bechtel, as was a reduction in the width of the fingerboard .

Model development

At the beginning of the 19th century, the guitar was a long-known, but still immature, instrument. After the guitar had played a subordinate role alongside the lute , the forest zither , the mandolin , the cister and the vihuela , there was strong demand in post- Napoleonic Europe both for the instrument itself and for the instrument suitable for it Music. With players and composers such as Fernando Sor , Dionisio Aguado , Mauro Giuliani , Ferdinando Carulli and others, the guitar also began to develop from an amateur instrument for song accompaniment to an instrument suitable for polyphonic music and for concert music. In the period after 1815, the term guitar romance appeared in Europe and a little later also in the USA for the phenomenon of massive enthusiasm for the instrument . So it came about that in the period from 1830 the development steps and maturation processes of the musical instrument guitar took place, which led to the instruments we know today and which - at least in some areas - can be regarded as final forms.

Martin 12-Fret Dreadnought (CEO-5)

In this atmosphere, which was also carried over to the new world, CF Martin emigrated from Saxony in Germany to the USA. While it was up to Antonio de Torres to bring the development of the guitar to maturity as a concert instrument on the European continent, it was up to the young Christian Frederick Martin to initiate the development that ultimately brought about the steel-string guitar, which in the Folk music from many regions, popular music of all conceivable styles and increasingly also modern concert music has started an incomparable triumph.

Both in Europe and in America, the development of the guitar was primarily accompanied by a significant increase in the size of the sound body. If you look at the early models from Martin, you can still clearly see their common roots with contemporary European instruments of the time. They were significantly smaller than anything common today and with their similarly large bulges on both sides of the "waist" looked a bit like an "8".

Martin soon started to standardize his instruments. He designated the smallest guitar with the number "3", the next largest with "2", and the largest with "1". After the development towards even larger body shapes, the "0" model was introduced (a size that is still available today as the smallest model). The nomenclature turned out to be not very farsighted, because after the development of even larger body shapes one should actually have chosen "−1" and "−2" as the designation. Martin, however, simply called the next larger model “00” and the largest model available for a few years “000”.

Parallel to the development of the body sizes, the change of the model range to steel strings already described above took place at the beginning of the 20th century. The preference for “X-bracing” turned out to be advantageous, because it withstood the increased tension of the steel string much better than the bracing based on the Torres model, which was occasionally used in this area.

Martin 14-Fret Dreadnought (HD-28)

The dreadnought guitar

Shortly before the First World War , Martin manufactured a guitar, which was huge according to the circumstances at the time, according to an order from the Ditson department store chain, which was offered for a certain time as an "acoustic bass guitar". It did not prove to be particularly successful, although this instrument was nothing more than the original form of today's "dreadnought" guitars. The actual year of birth of the dreadnought is 1916; This body shape was designed by Frank Henry Martin, the grandson of Christian F. Martin, who has been managing director of the company since 1888, and Harry Hunt, the manager of the Ditson music store in New York at the time. Thanks to their quite large body compared to other acoustic models of the time, dreadnoughts delivered a loud, assertive sound. It got into the hands of successful interpreters and so began to spread more and more. The name Dreadnought ("fear of nothing") was based on a class of battleships of the British Navy, the largest of their time, which was considered particularly modern and powerful at the time.

Another development that took place on Martin guitars is a constructive change in the neckline. While the Torres classical guitar and the instruments that Martin had made since his apprenticeship had the neckline towards the body at the twelfth fret - the octave - Martin had also been making guitars with the neckline at the fourteenth fret since the 1930s. Now that the Dreadnought was even bigger than the "000", it could have been typed with "0000". However, Martin decided to use the “D” as the type designation.

This history of model development is reflected in the range of Martin guitars available today. The Dreadnought is available in its shape, which has been customary since the 1930s, and in the original shape with a neck at the 12th fret. One example is the “CEO-5” model , which was built as a special edition in an edition of just 500 units. In the meantime, people have even gone over to meticulously recreating the original dreadnought, which - according to the history of its origin - is called the Ditson dreadnought . The “000” model is also available in the form with the neck at the fourteenth fret, as well as in its design, which dates back to the end of the 19th century, with the neck at the twelfth collar. The models “00” and “0” are also available and allow guitar enthusiasts to participate in a tradition that goes back to the time before the American Civil War .

In addition to the nomenclature of the body shapes 3, 2, 1, 0, 00, 000, D and J (for "Jumbo"), names for the equipment variants, i.e. the selected tonewoods and the decorations, appeared as early as the 1840s. These were marked by digits that initially indicated the prices of the guitars in US dollars, but then became independent and remained characteristic to this day. Cost a guitar with selected spruce top , rosewood body and fingerboard made of ebony , with ornaments made of whalebone was charged with 28 dollars, so it is at a 000-28 still a guitar with the appropriate equipment details, but in terms of Price has long outgrown the regions of that time. The white edge banding made from whale bones or ivory (also called binding ) has meanwhile given way to plastic.

Today, Martin uses further letter combinations in addition to the number, which are intended to denote various equipment details, so that one can now certainly encounter guitar types that have the awkward and somewhat technocratic designation HD-16-RLSH, which means “ H erringbone- D readnought, type 16, equipped with a R osewood (rosewood) corpus design and L arge S ound h ole "( sound hole ) is meant.

Martin & Co. today

In the 1970s, Martin bought some companies. These included the Darco String Company (owned by the D'Addario family ), Vega Banjo Works, the Swedish company Levin and a Dutch guitar manufacturer. Of these companies, only Darco is part of Martin today. In particular, the investment in European guitar manufacturers turned out to be a failure.

After Martin only offered the " D-28 " and "D-18" models in the 1970s , the company gradually expanded its product range again. In doing so, models were used that were successful in the 1930s and have a legendary reputation to this day. Martin & Co now offers a variety of designs and equipment variants that have been manufactured over the company's long history, for example guitars of size "000" with a neck at the twelfth fret and a wider fingerboard, as is already the case knew at the turn of the century.

Cheap steel-string guitars from Japan ( Takamine ) and other emerging Asian countries proved to be a new challenge . Martin tried to counter this by now going over to having guitars made in Japan according to the specifications of the parent company. These instruments, which can still be found in retail outlets today, became known under the Sigma Guitars brand . Another approach was to have guitar parts prefabricated in Japan. They were delivered to Nazareth ( Pennsylvania ) and completed by Martin & Co. These instruments have become known as "Shenandoah Martins". It soon turned out, however, that the price advantage that had been expected from partial production in Japan was largely canceled out by transport costs. Finally, in the mid-eighties, the head office began designing a line of inexpensive instruments and bringing them onto the market. The instrument series of the so-called Road and X series that were created in this way proved to be a resounding success, because they offered those interested in affordable instruments with all the necessary properties of a good musical instrument: good workmanship, balanced sound and good playability.

In the meantime Martin has started to manufacture the instruments of the cheapest line, the X-series, in their branch factory in Mexico .

In addition to a number of high-quality series, Martin also produces the Dreadnought Junior (D Jr.) and the Little Martin in a low-priced segment. The range is completed by numerous Signature Series (see below) and custom shop guitars.

In 2004 the million barrier was broken. Martin is still run as a family business today and is currently under the management of Christian Frederick Martin IV. Since the company has been continuously family-owned since its existence in 1833 and the vast majority of all artists from popular music in addition to many music-loving individuals played and play his instruments, there is no doubt that the company CF Martin & Co. can be described as part of the cultural history of America.

In 2008, for the 175th anniversary of the company Martin, 50 pieces of the Martin 00 Stauffer 175th were manufactured and sold worldwide, which pay special tribute to the teacher of the company founder, Johann Georg Stauffer .

Signature models

Eric Clapton's 000-28EC signature guitar.

Martin has created a number of signature models, including for John Renbourn , Andy Fairweather-Low , Johnny Cash , Eric Clapton , John Mayer , Richie Sambora , Paul Simon , Mark Knopfler , Tom Petty , Eric Johnson , Sting , Dan Fogelberg and Ed Sheeran . Peter Bursch , the “guitar teacher of the nation”, was the first German to have his own signature guitar, and the first Austrian to receive “Mr. Fingerpicking “ Peter Ratzenbeck . There are also signature models for Wolfgang Niedecken from the BAP group and for Kuddel from the Toten Hosen . Martin also has different sets of Eric Clapton guitar strings (Clapton's Choice) for acoustic guitars.

Many famous guitarists have used or have been using Martin guitars for years, including Joan Baez (0-45), Johnny Cash (D-35 in black), John Frusciante , Dick Gaughan , Joni Mitchell (D-28), Paul Simon , David Crosby (D-45), Stephen Stills and Neil Young , who plays a D-28 from the 1940s that previously belonged to Hank Williams ; Among them was Elvis Presley , who recorded the famous Sun Sessions exclusively with his Martin.

Further products

In addition to guitars, Martin Guitars also offers other products and accessories for guitar players. In addition to an extensive range of strings , this includes effect devices for guitars.

literature

  • Philip F. Gura, CF Martin and His Guitars 1796-1873 , University of North Carolina Press 2003
  • Richard Johnston, Jim Washburn, Martin Guitars - An Illustrated Celebration of America's Premier Guitarmaker , 1997
  • Teja Gerken, Michael Simmons, Frank Ford, Richard Johnston: Acoustic guitars: Everything about construction and history , Munich 2003, ISBN 3-910098-24-X
  • Erik Pierre Hofmann, Pascal Mougin and Stefan Hackl: Stauffer & Co. - The Viennese Guitar of the 19th Century , Germolles sur Grosne, 2011 (Editions Les Robins), ISBN 978-2-9538868-0-1
  • Stefan Hackl: The guitar in Austria - From Abate Costa to Zykan , Innsbruck / Vienna / Bozen 2011.
  • Tony Bacon, Paul Day: The Ultimate Guitar Book. Edited by Nigel Osborne, Dorling Kindersley, London / New York / Stuttgart 1991; Reprint 1993, ISBN 0-86318-640-8 , pp. 26-31.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tony Bacon, Paul Day: The Ultimate Guitar Book. 1991; Reprint 1993, p. 26.
  2. ^ Tony Bacon, Paul Day: The Ultimate Guitar Book. Edited by Nigel Osborne, Dorling Kindersley, London / New York / Stuttgart 1991; Reprint 1993, ISBN 0-86318-640-8 , p. 26.
  3. ↑ http://www.martinguitar.com/about-martin/the-martin-story/martin-timeline.html
  4. ↑ Markneukirchen Musical Instrument Museum
  5. ↑ The document online at studia-instrumentorum.de
  6. ^ A b Philip F. Gura, CF Martin and His Guitars 1796-1873, University of North Carolina Press, 2003, p. 106.
  7. ^ Tony Bacon, Paul Day: The Ultimate Guitar Book. 1991; Reprint 1993, p. 26 and 30 f.
  8. ↑ on salzburg.com ( memento of March 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on March 28, 2014

Web links

Commons : CF Martin  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 40 ° 45 ′ 19 ″  N , 75 ° 18 ′ 16.1 ″  W.