This Takamine F-450S-A is a 14-fret dreadnought with a spruce top and rosewood back and sides.
On the headstock, Takamine imitated the style of the vertical Martin logo. Takamine took the same approach to their Guild and Gallagher copies.
Nope! I’m talking about the delightful 1978 Takamine F-450S-A, an unashamed, fractions-of-an-inch-accurate copy of one of Martin’s most prized designs. According to Takamine’s 1976 catalog, the F-450S-A was “the finest guitar made by Takamine,” featuring genuine Pacific abalone pearl inlaid by hand. The catalog boasts of the experienced older craftsman slowly teaching young apprentices the “Takamine way” to make guitars. While there can be no doubt the F-450S-A is a fine instrument, the Takamine way sure looks a lot like the Martin way to us!
A revealing statement can be found just a page further in the catalog: “To the eye and to the ear, a Takamine matches any guitar on the market today.” You don’t say!
“To the pocketbook however, a Takamine is no match. Play and compare. You’ll find the sound you want at about a third the price.”
The logic was simple: A quality Martin clone made cheaply in Japan could easily be marketed to American consumers who couldn’t afford the real thing. While researching, I came across this illuminating post on The Unofficial Martin Guitar Forum: “Being from Western North Carolina and picking out with older folks on porches, I could never afford a Martin. When we would be picking, others would come up and say I like your Mar... tin... and then stop and look like they took a bite out of a rotten tater.”
Takamine mimicked other brands, too. The same 1976 catalog features the name “Takamine” contorted into the distinctive “peaked” Guild logo. Not too long ago, we had a Takamine-made Gallagher copy come into Fanny’s House of Music, with the famous Gallagher “G” subtly morphed into a “T.” This period in the 1970s is often called the “lawsuit era,” a term that refers to a 1977 lawsuit filed by Gibson against Ibanez for infringing on their headstock design. The phrase “lawsuit era” might suggest that American companies were suing their Japanese counterparts left and right, but the truth is, lawsuits were rare, and Gibson and Ibanez settled out of court. There was no lawsuit against Takamine for their headstocks, although Martin did send a cease and desist letter. Soon, Takamine, Ibanez, and other Japanese companies began cranking out great original designs of their own, and the lawsuit era was over.
The oblong-hexagon abalone inlays on the fretboard are another feature of this guitar that resembles a Martin.
According to the Takamine catalog, the back and sides of our F-450S-A are made of jacaranda, and, boy, did that ever send me down a rabbit hole! It sure looks a lot like rosewood to me. Besides, with everything else on this guitar being such a close copy of a D-41, why would Takamine use an entirely different species of wood for the back and sides? Jacaranda is a genus of 49 species of flowering plants, and rosewood belongs to the genus Dalbergia, which famously does not flower. Everyone knows that. (Just kidding.)
As it turns out, the journey the word “jacaranda” takes from Portuguese to Japanese to English can leave us with a term that generally means “rosewood,” even though jacaranda is a very different species. Washburn, Tokai, and other Japanese manufacturers sometimes even listed fretboard material as “Jacaranda (Brazilian Rosewood),” which is nearly enough to turn my brain to mush! At a certain point, one has to admit defeat and begin climbing out of the rabbit hole. We may never know exactly what species of wood we’re dealing with here, but who cares when the guitar sounds this good?
The Takamine catalog says the back and sides are jacaranda, a colloquialized umbrella term that often just means “rosewood.”
The neck of our Tak’ has a comfortable medium-C shape and nice low action. It’s clearly a well-built instrument with good volume and depth of tone. It’s in outstanding condition for its age, with hardly a mark on it, which means there’s a lot of songs in this old gal! It may be a mere “knock-off,” but don’t knock it ’til you try it. It’s a great guitar and I can’t wait to see who it inspires next.
What assumptions do you make about this guitar's sound?
It got me thinking: Why don’t I contact some of my luthier friends and industry colleagues to see if there are common threads in how we talk about acoustic guitar tone? It turns out that many of us are speaking a similar language when we discuss what we’re hearing, with many adjectives and buzzwords cropping up again and again.
Trevor Healy of Healy Guitars told me he finds himself using a wide variety of descriptors while communicating in his work, including “sparkle,” “headroom,” “compression,” “body,” and “roundness.” Trevor’s preference is for terms that can somehow be objectively measured, like those pertaining to sustain and EQ. In the end, he relies on customer input, asking them, “How does it make you feel?”
“Every great cello in the world is made of maple. Have you ever heard a bright cello?”—Dana Bourgeois
Brian Dickel, who took over for Jeff Huss when he retired from Huss & Dalton, prefers to keep it simple. “I think descriptors that convey tone in general terms that are easy to interpret such as thin, muddy, dark, warm, etc. work universally better than more flowery language,” he told me. Brian says that “woody,” “warm,” and “balanced” come up most often, and these reflect the tonal profile that he tries to impart into Huss & Dalton guitars.
I’ve always marveled at Chuck Baleno’s scientific approach to voicing, relying on the study of frequencies to dial in a consistently strong sound in his flattop guitars. Baleno says, “I will use ‘tight,’ ‘loose,’ and ‘resonant pitch’ related to frequencies in Hz. Resonant pitch is the main top resonant frequency, found by doing spectrum audio analysis. A tight guitar is in the higher range of frequencies. This will cut through in a band setting, and have strong projection. A loose guitar would be in the lower range of frequencies, and typically has a stronger bass. Obviously, we want the best of both!”
“In the end, he relies on customer input, asking them, ‘How does it make you feel?’”
Certain tone woods almost always prompt the same descriptors. Rosewood is “lush” and mahogany is “woody.” These descriptors can spark deeper conversations, and both are usually considered complementary. Maple, though, is frequently tagged with “bright,” which can be read as vaguely pejorative, and an opinion often issued before the guitar is even played or heard. Here, the wood’s pale appearance might be creating some negative association that can be hard for certain players to overcome. Staining the wood a darker color can flip the mental switch for some skeptics, but as a lover of maple guitars, I prefer Dana Bourgeois’ insight: “Every great cello in the world is made of maple. Have you ever heard a bright cello?”
These luthiers and I are mostly simpatico on the meaning of many tonal descriptors, and it makes me think that a kind of common language has started to naturally develop on the subject. Sometimes, though, enthusiasm for an instrument’s sound can be successfully communicated in a more unusual way. Steve Miklas, owner of Acoustic Music Works, tells of a particular Huss & Dalton CM—made with cedar over koa—which had a tonal profile that he found difficult to put into words. Online, Miklas listed the requisite specs, and then wrote simply, “This guitar is like Thanksgiving dinner. After playing it, you may need to take a nap!” A customer called almost immediately to say, “When I read that, I knew exactly what you meant! I’ll take it!”
Poetry about luthiery? I don’t think anyone would mind.
Joe Silvius, an exotic tonewood specialist at Martin, has been with the company for 27 years.
Here at Premier Guitar, we’ve done profiles on master guitar builders in the past. But unlike many guitar factories around the country, Martin doesn’t have master builders, exactly. They rely on a crew of highly skilled specialists, rather than individuals who oversee a guitar’s production from start to finish. Silvius, whose title is exotic tonewood specialist, is one of the former.
After the loss of his baseball career prospects, Silvius left college to work at the factory, where he started out in the string division. He then moved on to fretting, and then pre-finish (which involves body sanding before finish is applied), where he stayed for two years, eventually running the department. About 23 years ago, he switched over to the sawmill and acclimating areas, and for the past six or seven years, he’s been working in the custom shop as well. There, he’s responsible for guiding dealers in selecting the perfect wood for their custom builds.
“Obviously there’s thoughts—I’m sure everybody has them—of something else, maybe better, but I can’t see anything better than this.”
But before that can happen, incoming wood—that ends up on the shelves for dealer selection—must be inspected and acclimated, or dried. Now, when it comes to guitar building, wood drying may not sound like the most thrilling aspect. But after forests and lumber yards, it’s where guitars begin, and if that core material isn’t handled with care, intuition, and technical expertise, there would be no guitars from Nazareth (or anywhere else, for that matter).
Part of Silvius’ expertise is knowing how to treat a wide variety of tonewoods to reduce their moisture content—the woods Martin accepts can come in at up to about 40 percent—to the desired range of six to eight percent. The process involves “sticking,” where cut pieces of lumber are literally placed on horizontal support “sticks” of wood to enable air to flow through them. Then, the wood is placed in a kiln set to temperatures specific to the species being dried (as high as around 160°F), until the ideal moisture content is reached.
Silvius explains that customers have been increasingly interested in seeing unusual grain patterns on their guitars, such as that shown by this cocobolo back.
Courtesy of Martin Guitar
Sometimes, wood is brought below that desired range and then reacclimated, which helps to “stabilize the wood for less issues in the future,” explains Silvius. But every species dries differently, and has to be handled carefully to ensure that it survives the process: If it’s dried too much, the cells in the wood will die, making it brittle, which also prevents reacclimating. If it’s dried either too quickly or too slowly, it can lead to different types of damage that make the wood unusable.
Ebony, for example, takes six months to dry—if it’s done any faster, it will crack. “I would say ebony is probably the most complicated,” Silvius explains. “We’ve gotten really good at controlling it. Everybody wants ebony for their fretboard and bridge, so we gotta make sure we keep that in as good of shape as possible.” Then there are other woods like gonçalo alves, “which is a rare wood—it’s hard to work with. It doesn’t like to stay flat. We put plastic bands around it to help keep pressure on it to try to keep it as flat as possible.” Other tonewoods, like rosewood and sapele, are more forgiving, and take just two weeks to dry before they’re put in the kiln.
If you’re wondering about torrefaction (the process of drying wood at an extreme temperature to capture the sound quality of vintage guitars), that’s done by a vendor offsite. Silvius explains that it requires a specialized kiln with a controlled low-oxygen atmosphere, and a proprietary “recipe.”
Having worked in the acclimating area for more than two decades, Silvius is knowledgeable on how to put a wide variety of tonewoods through the drying process.
Once the incoming wood has gone through the acclimating process, it’s then ready for the production line, and the custom shop. For the uninitiated, the custom shop offers a unique experience for dealers from around the world to come in and design their own guitars to be sold at their locations, down to choosing the type and sets of wood to be used. The designs themselves may not be “exclusive,” per se—as dealers’ requested builds might be similar to those chosen by peers—but are often created with their specific customer base in mind. (The custom shop also has guitars pre-built for dealer selection, if they might be interested in buying a finished model as opposed to designing it themselves.) Some recent visits have been from Haggerty’s Music from South Dakota, Reno’s Music from Indiana, Empire Music from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Andertons Music Co. from the U.K.
“The piece of wood that they select has to speak to them. It’s all a perception. Everybody loves things differently.”
“Every dealer is different,” Silvius comments. “Some come in with an actual plan. They know what guitars they want; they know what species they want. They get a list, come in, do their thing, and leave. For others, it’s like a supermarket. They look at the shelf and say, ‘Let’s take a look at some of this.’” A lot of Martin’s exotic woods are kept in locked cages that only a handful of employees have access to, Silvius being one of them.
“I’m not much of a salesman,” he adds. “When they come in, I shoot ’em straight. I’m not going to tell you something just because I want you to buy this guitar. That’s not what I’m about. The piece of wood that they select has to speak to them. It’s all a perception. Everybody loves things differently.”
In the past, Martin would have rejected wild-grain East Indian rosewood for its nontraditional patterns, seen here.
Courtesy of Martin Guitar
Sometimes, the selection process can lead to some humorous, unconventional scenarios. One year, a group of dealers came in from Japan, who were all interested in the same pre-built model. “The custom shop director brought in a putting mat, and they actually putted,” Silvius says, laughing. “Whoever made the putt got the opportunity to buy the guitar. It’s just fun.”
Silvius says that the cultural trend in the guitar world over the past several years has been all about aesthetics: wild-grain East Indian rosewood, striped Gabon ebony, flame and quilted maple. Customers today are looking for something more distinctive in a guitar’s appearance—and that trend has steered Martin in a wildly different direction from where they’d been for decades. “It was about tradition, so everything had to be perfectly quartersawn [cut to yield straight-grain pieces]. If it wasn’t, we would reject it. But now, people love the look of the [different grain patterns]. Doesn’t necessarily affect the guitar—the sound or anything. It just gives you that ‘wow.’”
“We took a trip to New York recently,” Silvius shares. “I was at Rudy’s [Music], who’s going to be here next week to select wood, and the gentleman who works there was telling me what he wants. He likes more traditional, straight grain. But he needs something that his customers are going to turn around and go, ‘Wow, the back just looks incredible.’ These dealers know their customer base. They have regular customers that come in, and they know what they want.”
In Martin’s custom shop, Silvius guides dealers in selecting the right woods for their custom guitar designs.
As Silvius alluded, quartersawn wood has straight grain, and has long been highly sought-after. But it’s becoming scarcer, partially because in order to get it, harvested trees have to be at least 24″ in diameter. A less expensive alternative, flatsawn—one of the kinds Martin used to reject—produces wood with “cathedral,” or spire-shaped, grain patterns. And especially given the shift in popular preference, Martin has been bringing more flatsawn wood into their production line. However, Silvius comments that flatsawn is harder to work with, as the pieces can be fickle: “It twists. [Some pieces often] turn into almost like a potato chip and we can’t use it. But other pieces stay flat.”
Aside from handling unruly wood, Silvius’ biggest challenge in his work overall, he says, is “probably our own internal specs. We are so critical of the material itself. Our standards are set so high that sometimes we are our own worst enemy. Because we want everything to be perfect, and it just can’t be. It’s wood. Even when I match sets—we like everything to have perfectly matching grain or perfectly matching color, or both, and sometimes you just can’t. We beat ourselves up over it.”
“People love the look of the [different grain patterns]. Doesn’t necessarily affect the guitar—the sound or anything. It just gives you that ‘wow.’”
When Silvius plays more of a role in selecting the wood for a dealer, which can be another option in the custom shop experience, it becomes a bit more personal for him. “I try not to take much home with me, but I do,” he laughs. “Say they want a high-end D-45, and I gotta select either the Brazilian rosewood, or maybe the cocobolo. Did I make the right choice? Are they really going to be happy with that guitar when they get it? But I’ve also had dealers come in that, when I would meet them for the first time, say, ‘So you’ve been picking out my wood! Thank you,’ and just give me a handshake. It feels great when that happens.”
Ultimately, Silvius says it’s those relationships that make up the best part of his job. It doesn’t hurt that, because Martin employs so many Nazareth locals, he also works alongside many people whose family members he grew up with. “It is a really close-knit community. Even the VP [Deb Karlowitch], she retired a couple years ago, but I graduated with her son. Her husband, when we walked home from school, would pick us up sometimes on the way.”
As Silvius emphasizes the passion that Martin’s roughly 500 employees have for their work, which he says speaks to their consistently high-quality products, it might surprise you that he doesn’t play guitar. “It’s funny, because I’m not a guitar guy. I’ll be honest with you,” he admits. “I always blame it on having short, chubby fingers.
“I wish I would have tried to learn during [the pandemic]. I still want to learn to play, I just gotta get into the right mind-frame. My kids are now older, so I’m not going to sporting events and everything. It’s time I should learn.”