"Chicken Bill" Martin

My brother got me looking at Martins. He loaned me his Little Martin to try out. It's one the HPL's (high pressure laminate) guitars. It played and sounded great. Very little real wood which was a real turn off for me. At least in my head it was. In practice it turns out that it may be a good even a great thing. Resistant to sweat and the heat of the trunk a HPL guitar starts to make sense. Then I wondered about the life of the instrument. It's basically a formica guitar. I tried to research the life of formica and found only a smattering of info on the net. Then I did a little field research - okay not field research - I went into the kitchen. We have formica covered counter tops there that are at least 20 years old (they came with the house). At one spot part of the formica is bowed out from the curve of the counter. I gave it a whack. Sprung in and back out. Not brittle, just tough as ever. Okay so no worries about a HPL guitar not lasting. I went to the local music store and started playing a Martin DXK2. It's a Koa grained HPL guitar with a stratabond neck made in Mexico. It was setup perfect and it felt great. The neck seemed like the perfect mix of finished and unfinished in feel. The box rings steady and long. It's not incredibly different from a wood guitar, it just seems smoother and longer. It sounds really really good. So after visiting her every day for about a week, I took the plunge.

I have to say I feel the opposite about alternate material guitars than I did before. When I worked at Peavey, I watched the robots cut a neck out of a blank and easily 40% of the wood ended up in shavings on the floor. Tragic really. So I feel good knowing that very few trees or at least a very small portion of them were actually consumed in the making of my instrument.

And the fact that I lose none of the warm analog resonant playing experience like you do when you go from piano to keyboards makes it all good.

So I call it the "Chicken Bill" Martin because as my grandma used to say "It's all chicken but the bill and that's chicken stew." It's every bit a Martin just made out of the scientifically collected shavings and pieces of wood and transformed into a legacy 'tar.