Martin Factory Tour

I recently had a round-number birthday, and Darling Wife suggested we go to the Martin Guitar factory and museum in Nazareth, PA for the day. She was working the actual day of my birthday, so I took a personal day on the day before, and off we went.

This is something we've talked about for a while. Martin is famous as a maker of high-end acoustic guitars, and they make them right here in Pennsylvania. It's not that far away (1.5 hours), and everyone I know who's been on the tour highly recommends it.

There has been talk of a birthday Martin, but that's not happening today. We've looked at Martin dealers, and the one we'll go to is Meadowood Music, up near Reading - and they're closed on Mondays.

We arrived around 11:30am after an easy drive up the Northeast Extension, and were assigned to the 12:30 tour. That gave us time to look through the museum - which was fascinating. Martin has been making guitars since the 1830's, and the museum was a history of the guitar in addition to the history of the company. Things got especially interesting when you got to the 50's and 60's up to today, as just about anyone you've ever heard of has played a Martin, and there were instruments from Elvis, Bob Dylan, Lennon and McCartney, Johnny Cash, Crosby Stills & Nash, Eric Clapton, etc., etc.

Our tour group was called at 12:25, and the tour lasted about an hour. You actually walk through the factory and workshops as they're making guitars. It was so interesting to see blocks of wood coming in, and the various stages as building and assembling guitars. There's machinery that does a lot of the precision cutting - but there's also a lot of it that's done by hand.

When the tour is over, they direct you to the gift shop (of course I now have a Martin Guitar t-shirt), and the Picking Room - a roomful of high end Martins that you can play (but not buy, you have to buy from a dealer.)

I played everything that had up on the wall. The D-18 sounded fantastic, with an especially strong treble sound. The 000-28 had a very satisfying fatter sound, and I kinda liked the smaller body "000" size instead of the full-size dreadnaught (the "D" in D-18 or D-28.) The twelve-string D-2812 had an *amazing* sound - I don't think I ever fully appreciated the big ringing sound of a good 12-string guitar.

So I had some ideas on what I'd potentially be interested if and when we finally found a time to get up to Meadowood. But it was past 2pm and we were hungry, so we got ready to go. It had been a *hugely* fun day. We grabbed some catalogs and information, including a list of area dealers. The nearest one was one mile away....

(Continued here)