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He was a serious influence – lots of people started playing bc of him. And IIRC one of the people on the forum has his old D28….
Last night, spent 4+ hours on the OM during the weekly work jam. Here’s what I can remember of what we played. People kept calling tunes and we kept going for it one after the other. Covered a fair bit of ground and spent a lot of time laughing about “we played this after that?”
Vengo a Ofrecer Mi Corazon – Francis Cabral, scary beautiful, and easy.
Jardin d’Hiver – Keren Ann, amazing
Autumn Leaves in French and English
One Note Samba
This Masquerade – my god, Leon Russell could write
Stormy Monday
Fancy C blues
Seven Steps to Heaven – Miles
Just once in a very blue moon – Nancy Griffith
My baby wrote me a letter – Joe Cocker
Your Feets Too Big – Fats Waller
Ain’t Misbehavin’
Scarlet Begonias
Come Back Baby (Van Ronk’s arrangement)
Used Cars (Chuck Berry)
Maybelline
Pretzel Logic
The Last Mall (Steely Dan)
Sweet Child ‘o Mine
St James Infirmary
Rocky Mountain Way
In The City
Locomotive Breath
Any Major Dude
All of Me
Satin Doll
Smooth Operator (or smoothish operator, anyhow)
A Common Disaster (Cowboy Junkies)
Speaking Confidentially (Cowboy Junkies)
Lookin’ for the Time (Nancy Griffith)
Mona Ray
In Christ there is no East or West
Hesitation Blues
Sting’s Fragile finished the night.
Oh, the best J-200 around here is owned by one of the guys at Tall Toad in Petaluma (George?). OMG it is SO GOOD. I think it’s a 1956. Light as air and it has great thump (I see why Rev Gary Davis played them). It’s good strummed, too, big smooth sound. No, he won’t sell it. But he sometimes lets people test drive it.
Aloha –
The F-7 was a 14-fret from the get-go – all of the Martin archtops with square shoulders are 14-fret. The most famous conversion was David Bromberg’s – was based an F-7 (0000 size, 14-fret square shoulders). Martin didn’t do a 12-fret archtop – they were following Gibson, who had as a selling point the longer neck and greater upper fret access.
The only 12-fret archtop I think I’ve ever seen might have been a Buscarino of some sort, made for nylon strings.
If you want to get a feel for a 12-fret with cutaway, a good bet would be to try to test-drive a Martin Merle Haggard – it’s a 12-fret 000 with a cutaway and long scale. It’s a large instrument and relatively deep, and the sheer air mass of the design makes a lot of sound. The 0000 version would be enormous, and with J body depth, the air mass would be bigger still – you could land aircraft on that top and the body could be a cistern. With a cutaway, though, upper fret access would be there.
I really hope you find the sound you’re hearing…..it’s the best thing, when the instrument rings all your bells.
A lot of them are really overbuilt. Some of the ones from the forties and fifties are great, but after the early sixties and the adjustable bridge, they were very heavy.
I briefly had a mid-sixties one which was dead, and a repair person showed me the brace with a damping screw under the bridge that Gibson had added for some reason…loosening that helped, but it was too heavy overall. Gibson called it a tone adjuster. It was a 1×1 rod of maple with a screw that pressed a cork-lined metal disc about the size of a half dollar against the bottom of the bridge. Really.
A 12-fret OM Grand would have the upper shoulders extended a la a 12-fret 000, so it’s be a 12-fret 0000, which is getting into Larson Bros/Prairie State territory. Guitars like that have similar body volume to SJ-200s (or the slightly smaller J-185) with a slightly more “Martin-y” shoulder and lower bout shape.
Here’s Martin’s own take on it: https://www.laguitarsales.com/index.php/martin-cs-0000-18s-06679.html
If it were a deep body, it’d be a “J” in Martin-style nomenclature.
“OM,” Orchestra Model, is defined as 14 frets clear of the body – that was the entire purpose of the change in design in the late 1920s, as the longer neck appealed to orchestra banjo players crossing over from banjo to guitar way back when. Consequently, “12-fret OM” is something of a contradiction in terms. The specific feature set that made the early OMs so wonderful – and which Richard and crew do so wonderfully – is shortened-upper-bout 000-size body, 14-fret long-scale neck, typically wide nut/saddle (1-3/4” and 2-1/4” or thereabouts) and a ‘normal’ 000-depth body. The combination seems to be a good baseline for success – it offers remarkable power for its small size with surprising sweetness.
