Table of Contents
- What the custom shop brought to the Martin Fretboard Summit
- Small details you can order from Martin's custom shop
- The custom shop Terz, and the 5-28 you can buy
- Martin's wood buyer on mahogany, walnut and oak
- The standard line at the Martin Fretboard Summit
- Who should order a custom Martin
- Shop Martin, or ask about a custom order
Martin's custom shop brought more Swiss spruce tops to the Martin Fretboard Summit booth than we have ever seen in one room. We spent about half an hour there with Jimmy from the custom shop and Martin's wood buyer, playing one-off builds and asking the questions customers ask us every week: which spruce sits where, why a 42 gets a gloss neck, and what happened to the M body.
This is our walk through the Martin Fretboard Summit 2026 room, guitar by guitar, with what we said about each one. Some of these are one-offs you can't buy. Several are close cousins of guitars hanging in our shop right now, and we link those as we go.
What the custom shop brought to the Martin Fretboard Summit
Jimmy and Danny go down to the wood stacks, pick the sets, and dream up the specs. Then about 20 builders in the custom shop put them together. Jimmy calls them the most specialized craftsmen in the building. The same group also handles hide glue guitars and the Authentic series, so an Authentic counts as a custom shop guitar even though nobody ordered it one at a time.
Jump to: the spruce ranking at 5:52, Martin's wood buyer on mahogany supply at 19:44, and the Modern Deluxe truss rod answer at 23:50.
The first guitar off the wall was a 12-fret dreadnought, 28-style with herringbone trim and a Swiss top full of silky medullary rays. Next came a size 2 with a Swiss top and quilted Guatemalan rosewood. It is almost the same guitar we built with Martin, which is why we liked it so much. Small bodies don't usually move this much air. "They're so big and powerful even though they're tiny," we said after a few chords.
If Guatemalan rosewood is the itch, our custom shop Adirondack and Guatemalan rosewood OM-28 style pairs it with an Adirondack top instead of Swiss.
Swiss, Italian, Adirondack: where each spruce sits
We asked Jimmy why so many Swiss tops this year, and where Swiss sits against the red spruce tops it resembles. His answer was the clearest version of Martin's spruce ladder we've heard, and as you go down it the tone gets warmer and a little softer:
"Addy's kind of your pinnacle. The Swiss and the Italian are kind of a step below that. Carpathian can be thrown in there, and then you get into your Sitkas and Engelmanns from there."| Top | Where Jimmy puts it | How it sounds |
|---|---|---|
| Adirondack | The pinnacle | Bright, punchy, in your face |
| Swiss, Italian | A step below | Close to red spruce, to our ears |
| Carpathian | In with Swiss and Italian | Not described |
| Sitka, Engelmann | Next down | Warmer and a little softer |
The reason for all the Swiss at the Martin Fretboard Summit is simple: when Jimmy and Danny went through the stacks, the Swiss looked good, so they used it.
That ladder lines up with the guitars on the wall:
- A 0-42 in Honduran rosewood with a Sitka VTS top and snowflake inlays
- A 000 with a Swiss top and quilted bubinga back and sides
- An 18-style with a Swiss top, which Jimmy called baseline custom shop
- A 45-style with an Adirondack VTS top and tree of life inlay on the bridge and fingerboard
- A 42-style with a clear Adirondack top, Guatemalan rosewood and golden-era bracing
That last one surprised us. Rosewood usually has some heft to it, and this one was light in the hands. Jimmy credits the golden-era bracing, and you can hear it in the video. It's also exactly our kind of bling: cat's eyes and snowflakes, without abalone everywhere. The 42 is where we draw the line.
Small details you can order from Martin's custom shop
A few options came up at the Martin Fretboard Summit that customers rarely know to ask for:
- Gloss necks. On standard models, anything 42-style and above gets a gloss neck, and a 41 keeps a satin back of the neck. The custom shop can do either.
- Two headstock shapes. The standard headstock has slightly rounded corners. The custom shop also offers a square-corner version, which we saw on an all-mahogany guitar with maple bindings and 41-style pearl.
- Bursts with names. The flamed-mahogany 0 14-fret wore a mahogany burst, also called the Tweedy burst after the Jeff Tweedy Martin. Jimmy said the burst just brings out flamed mahogany.
- The M body. The M-36 left the standard line last year, so the custom shop is now the main way to get an M. We love the body. It isn't for everybody.
Our custom shop 000-17 style in all flamed mahogany is the unbursted version of that idea. The booth also had a 00 deep body with wild grain back and sides, 45 pearl and torch inlays, and we have a wild grain East Indian rosewood custom shop 000-28 style in stock. Deep bodies came up twice. On a 000 deep body in walnut with a pyramid bridge, Jimmy said the extra depth helps drive the top. That's a recurring thing with custom shop guitars: we expect one to sound a certain way, and it doesn't.
For the full story of how a custom order comes together, read about our first Martin Custom Shop guitar.
The custom shop Terz, and the 5-28 you can buy
The sleeper of the Martin Fretboard Summit booth was a custom shop 5-18 Terz. Strung with mediums, it sits at standard pitch. String it with custom lights and you can tune it up a third. We want one for the studio: lay it over a big-bodied guitar playing in a different position and the two parts stay out of each other's way. Martin now makes the 5-28 Terz as a standard model, and you can do the same tuning trick on it.
Ours is the Martin 5-28 Terz with aging toner.
Martin's wood buyer on mahogany, walnut and oak
Martin's wood buyer bought most of the wood Jimmy had just walked us through at the Martin Fretboard Summit. "Sometimes Jimmy paints it black," he said, and he's not wrong: an all-black J-40 and a burgundy guitar spec'd off a GPC model were both on the wall. We asked him roughly how much wood Martin goes through.
"I probably buy 20,000 sets of mahogany a year, and we try and keep a year and a half, two year supply."Walnut comes from close to home, usually within a few hundred miles of the Nazareth shop. He was honest about the hard part: walnut is a great tonewood, and convincing people of that is the job. Martin is using more walnut and cherry now, and some oak. Koa for the T1K ukuleles grows only in Hawaii, and the curl comes from the higher elevations.
The oak has the best story. A Pennsylvania tree on some sort of registry, standing in front of a Quaker house, came down one day. The sawmill called Martin, and that oak is now on a guitar, paired with Pennsylvania walnut. We had already filmed a video on that guitar without hearing any of this, so now we want a standing meeting with the wood buyer.
The standard line at the Martin Fretboard Summit
The back half of the room was standard models, and the wood buyer made a point we agree with: a lot of people think Martin is grandpa's guitar, and it isn't.
- Authentic Aged. It's our favorite. "If you want the closest thing to an actual 1937 D-18 or 28, the Authentic Aged is the way to go," we said, and it does sound different from a standard Authentic. A 1935 D-18 sat in the booth next to the 1937 D-18 Authentic Aged, and the tone matched. The new one just needs 90 years of playing to get as loud.
- Modern Deluxe. The truss rod is no longer titanium. It's a steel and titanium hybrid now. Add the carbon fiber bridge plate, the Adirondack top, the asymmetrical neck and EVO fret wire. EVO went out of business. Martin still has a stock of it and is working with six companies to match it. The Liquidmetal bridge pins were new to the industry and exclusive to Martin.
- The double neck. John Mayer borrowed the museum's grand performance double neck for a tour and asked to buy it. Martin built him one instead, and last the wood buyer heard, close to a hundred have sold.
- OM-35 Inception. We're big fans. Critics called it a boardroom guitar, and the wood buyer agrees: the band saw operator, the sander, the wood buyer and product design met in the boardroom because you can't hold a meeting on the shop floor. No executives in the room.
- SC series. A new neck joint lets you adjust action and scale for intonation, on a veneer body at a fair price, with all-solid 18 and 28 versions.
On the Inception's skeletonized bracing, the wood buyer admitted he started out skeptical:
"I played the guitar for the first time and I went, no, this works."The brace shape lines up with the bridge ends to push more sound out of a smaller body. We've argued before that Martin takes heat whenever it innovates, and this booth was a good answer to that.
In stock from that list: the D-18 Authentic Aged 1937, a D-28 Modern Deluxe, the Grand J-28E DN double neck, an all-solid SC-28E, the veneer SC-13E in Mezcal Burst, and the newest release on the wall, the Joe Bonamassa OO-18. We love its printed retro top. Some people don't, and that's why Martin makes so many guitars. The year's new models are in our Martin NAMM 2026 roundup.
Who should order a custom Martin
The last guitar we talked about at the Martin Fretboard Summit was a custom shop 000-41 hand-painted by Chris Martin's cousin, then finished by Martin. People worry an art guitar won't sound as good. It played big. That's the case for the custom shop in one guitar: you pick the look, and the shop still builds it to sound like a Martin.
Order one if you want a specific top, a body Martin doesn't make in the standard line anymore (the M), or details like a square-corner headstock or a 42 with a gloss neck. Skip it if a standard model already does what you want. An Authentic Aged or a Modern Deluxe off our wall is a faster path, and you can play it before you buy.
Every Martin we sell goes through our 23-Point Professional Inspection before it ships.
Guitars over $1,000 also come with the Dread-Not Guarantee: a 1-year, 90% trade-in credit (pre-tax, less round-trip shipping), a 30-day in-home trial, and the humidity kit in the case.
Related reading
- Taylor at Fretboard Summit 2026
- Martin D-18 vs D-28: which one to buy
- Our Martin factory tour in Nazareth
Shop Martin, or ask about a custom order
We're heading to Nazareth in a few weeks to film the wood rooms and the custom shop options, so more of this is coming. Until then, browse every Martin in stock, see our Martin custom shop guitars, or browse every guitar in stock. For any one-off from the Martin Fretboard Summit room, from a Swiss-top 12-fret to an M body, ask us about ordering one. If you'd rather spread out the cost, there's financing through Synchrony.
