A Tuned-In Craftsman

Nov. 11, 2016

Traverse City's Matt Martin has carved out a niche making custom guitars

A builder, a woodworker, a guitarist. A table, a chair, a cedar-strip canoe. A chisel, a planer, fine-grit sandpaper. All of these components are the puzzle pieces of a larger whole: the zenith of one man’s skills as he finally discovers what he’s meant to do.

Matt Martin is the owner and craftsman behind Root Guitar Works in Traverse City. His days are spent in his own workshop, where guitar designs and music coexist in his head; he’s a musician who’s stepped back from his own performances to equip the stage for others. And he’s more than OK with that decision.

“I do play music,” Martin said.

“But in the end, I realized I was only good enough to play guitar for fun, so I don’t play out anymore. I knew I wouldn’t be able to put enough into being a musician to be as good as I’d want to be. So this is my avenue into music.” As a skilled woodworker — part of his living is made via his other company, Martin Restoration, through which he does home interiors — Martin sought something to put his talents into that could be his true focus.

“I’d been woodworking for a long time,” he explained. “And I’d built a lot of different things — furniture, a canoe — but I decided that I needed one thing I could really get better at. Making guitars is a culmination of all of my skills: woodworking, building trades and my interests in music.” So was crafting guitars an easy next step? “Not at all!” Martin laughed. “I bought a book to figure out what I was doing, read, well, most of it — and then just learned as I went along.”

He built his first guitar for his wife, Amy: a sixstring built of Hawaiian koa wood with a spruce top and a mahogany neck made from wood scraps that Martin salvaged from a restoration job. From there, he moved on to building more guitars, some to display and drum up more interest in his work, and others as custom orders. He’s sold about a dozen so far, which may not sound like a lot. But these aren’t your typical guitars; Martin’s stand apart by the virtue of his artistry, making each instrument as individual as its soon-to-be owner.

Most of what he crafts are six-string acoustic guitars, although he’s taken a few ventures into building solid-body electrics and a few bass guitars. His approach, first and foremost, is to let the wood do the talking. “A factory guitar is built to a formula, as if every piece of wood is exactly the same,” Martin explained. “What I have the luxury to do is focus on every piece of wood – all of which are very different – to get the most out of each piece.” He does this by tapping on the wood and listening, using his hands and eyes and years of woodworking skill to decipher where the build will go. “I can cut the wood thicker, sand it thinner, customize different sections,” he said. Even the origins of the wood are carefully considered.

“Tropical hardwoods are dense, and good for the back and sides of a guitar — they help with volume and resonance,” Martin said. “Spruce is almost always the top of a guitar — it has a very high strength-to-weight ratio, and can handle the tension of the strings being pulled across it.”

The neck of the guitar is almost always carved from mahogany, and the fretboard and bridge are made of African blackwood. “It won’t wear away as the guitar is played,” he pointed out.

The steps to build each guitar include finessing the wood, bending the sides, bracing the top and back, putting the “box” together, fitting and carving the neck, and then building in the frets, the spaces by which guitarists find octaves and notes. Premade fret wire is the only thing Martin purchases ahead; everything else he creates from scratch.

And 100 to 120 hours of craftsmanship later, a new guitar is born.

Each is an actual work of art, as evidenced by the care taken with the different colors and tones of the wood, the polish of the finishes, the meticulous precision with which the different parts of the guitar are put together. Martin presents his work with pride, but not ego; he’s confident that he’s good at this, but the impression you get is that he’s more interested in hearing what musicians think.

“I like to sound hole experiment and do things a little differently with these guitars,” he said. “Some of my guitars have the sound hole on the side instead of the top. The way I make the necks is a little different. I sometimes include custom details or inlays. But I don’t want to reinvent the guitar — I just want to maximize it, with clearer tone, more sustain, more volume. I want to offer that same recognizable acoustic guitar sound, but with … more.”

The first client who ordered a custom guitar from Martin refused to play it at first. “He came to get it, I opened up the guitar case, and he just stood there and stared at it,” Martin chuckled. “His friend told me later that he was so happy with it, he’d just lift the lid on the case and look at it. He ended up admiring it for two full weeks before he’d even play it.”

“My goal is to get these guitars into the hands of musicians,” Martin said. “I really like hearing somebody else play them. I can sit and strum and all that, but having an artist play the tool that I’ve made for them, the tool that will enable them to create their music — well, that’s the most satisfying thing for me.”

For more information on Matt Martin’s Root Guitar Works, visit rootguitarworks.com or call 231-492-0357.