RAISING THE TONE …
Editor-in-chief Jamie Dickson goes on the hunt for a ‘just right’ acoustic in the leafy suburbs of London
Colour me hypocritical, but I’ve all too often ignored the advice I’ve given to readers in these pages, namely: always try a guitar in person before you buy it, if possible. Anything less and it’s a roll of the dice whether you’ll click with the guitar you’ve bought sight unseen. And so it proved to be when I bought a Martin DR Centennial online from Coda Music in Stevenage recently. Let me start by saying that Coda’s service was amazing, and the used DR Centennial I bought from them was in beautiful condition and perfectly set up. And in many ways it was a great buy – apukka rosewood dreadnought by Martin with some very nice added extras, including an Adirondack Spruce top, plus vintage-style forwardshifted bracing. Its top had also received the VTS (Vintage Tone System) torrefying treatment normally reserved for Martin’s top-end vintage reissues. It was a great guitar, very playable, too.
Nonetheless, within a few weeks I began to wonder if it really was quite the right guitar for me. I play a lot of fingerstyle with a European folk influence, whereas the DR Centennial was a real flat-picker’s delight: an unabashed cannon that came most vividly to life when played with a pick and its sound has strong Americana vibes. I really liked it, but as I made preparations to record a fingerstyle album in a very different style I began to wonder if the DR would be a square peg in a round hole on such a recording?
A trip round to Guitarist contributor Rod Brakes’ house made my mind up. Rod has a lovely late-50s Martin 0-18, a relatively small guitar that is a natural fit for fingerstyle. All the pieces I wanted to play on my recording sounded instantly great on it – and I was forced to conclude it was just better adapted to the kind of playing I wanted to do than the bold, bull-hearted DR Centennial I’d bought online.
Trading Places
After a little bit of soul-searching, I realised what I had to do. For a few years now, I’ve been following the comings and goings at a specialist retailer called Glenn’s Guitars in Enfield, North London. Owned and run by ex-Denmark Street guitar trader Glenn Sinnock, the company’s website explains that it was set up as the opposite of the high-pressure selling style encountered in some citycentre guitar shops, offering a quiet, leisurely listening environment in which to test out dozens of eclectic, interesting guitars. And while Glenn does have one or two electrics and pickup-equip
