A Whole New Type Of Relic | Guitar Village

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Full Transcript

Hi Sam from Guitar Village here and today at Center Stage we’re checking out the Martin d18 Street Legend so for those of you whove never heard of the d18 before this is a legendary Martin model the 18 series which is the style of the guitar came out in the mid 1800s or so but it wasn’t until about 80 years later that they decided to actually put this style into a dreadnought guitar and it was even later that they went for this Square shoulder dreadnought so a d18 it’s a square shoulder dreadnought guitar which is pretty big it has mahogany back and sides with a spruce top and a mahogany neck as well

okay let’s talk about the specifics of this actual guitar now they’ve stuck with the traditional formula we’ve got a square shoulder dreadnought it’s got mahogany back and sides a mahogany neck it’s got a spruce top too so this really fits the bill let’s talk about the bracing first now over here we’ve got the inside of what the bracing looks like on a guitar they’ve used scallop bracing on this particular one now I’ll tell you the difference between regular bracing and scalloped effectively this this is regular bracing we’ve got these straight lines here and on scallop bracing they actually dig into the bracing making it lighter which makes the top more resonant and sounds better effectively also with this they’ve gone for forward shifted X bracing so here is your X as I’m sure you can guess by the shape of it effectively they’ve just moved it slightly closer to the sound hole and that gives you a little bit more bass response too

let’s talk about some of the relicing because I think that’s probably the the elephant in the room that we should discuss now every acoustic manufacturer you know that does relicing has their own way of doing it and marted have gone for a really unusual technique with this one which I actually quite like now this is based off of Kirt gain’s Grandpa d8 and we checked out some pictures of it because we kind of had a suspicion that it was Martin haven’t officially said that but you can see there’s Parts where it matches up now all the pictures we’ve seen of these they all look pretty much the same and what we think is that they’ve effectively they taken a brand new d18 made it a satin finish and they put like a a really clever transfer over it so it simulates all those wear marks and you know the bits where it’s worn through the lacquer there you know these kind of dirty dents that would have been in there there’s even like a a a kind of um a faux crack in there as well which looks really cool too something that you typically would see on an old Martin the only other parts they’ve really relied they’ve done the pit guard they’ve kind of scuffed that up a bit to look quite genuine and they’ve aged the tuners a bit as

well so that’s you know Martin’s take on the relicing and what you get there and I think what a lot of players would like is you get pretty much a brand new guitar out the box that looks aged which is kind of what you get with a relic but they’ve done it in a really interesting unique way that I think a lot of players will

so my thoughts on this guitar after spending a bit of time playing it you know talking about some of the relicing and things and getting to know it better is that the d18 is such a versatile guitar you can do you know flat picking on it you can strum away you can do finger picking and it holds up really well I would say it’s slightly more tilted to strumming than finger picking but either way it’s going to sound great if you’re thinking of trying one of these out it’s a really playable guitar the neck profile Martin have used is their low oval neck profile which isn’t heavily tapered so it’s pretty slim all the way up and they’ve gone for the 1 and 3/4 in nut width which if your finger pck makes it so much more comfortable so I hope You enjoyed watching this video if you want to check out any more about this guitar the link will be in the description below one of the biggest selling points of this as well compared to a regular d18 is that this is going to be about 400 cheaper as well so it’s going to be a lot more accessible anyway as always thanks for watching and we’ll see you soon