Atkin Guitars
Essential 000 Acoustic Guitar (2025)
2025 · Listed at Elderly Instruments · Lansing, MI
Tracked on Tonewood Atlas — view the full listing at Elderly Instruments’ site.
Photos hot-linked from Elderly Instruments’ site — never rehosted.
Specs
- Top
- Torrefied Sitka
- Back / Sides
- Mahogany
- Neck
- Mahogany
- Fingerboard
- Ebony
- Body shape
- 000
- Scale length
- 24.9"
- Nut width
- 1 3/4"
- Frets to body
- 14
- Strings
- 6
- Cutaway
- No
- Condition
- New
- Year
- 2025
Atkin Guitars
Atkin Guitars are built in Canterbury, England, founded by Alister Atkin in 1995. What started as a one-man bench has grown into one of the UK's leading boutique acoustic builders — a sixteen-person shop making roughly 750 guitars a year, every one of them hand-built. Their reputation is anchored in pre-war Martin and Gibson replicas (the slope-shouldered "Nineteen" is a flagship), but the catalog spans original designs, an electric line that joined the family in 2020, and a custom shop that builds whatever a player can dream up. The signature finish is an aged nitrocellulose lacquer developed over thirty years — soft, light, designed to check and patina naturally rather than stay perfect, mirroring how a lightly-used vintage instrument ages. Tops have been baked since 2011 for stability and the kind of resin-crystallized character usually associated with old wood. The player roster reads like a UK songwriters' room: Richard Hawley, Robert Plant, Graham Coxon, Kris Drever, Eddi Reader, Elbow.
Elderly Instruments
Elderly Instruments has been a Lansing, Michigan institution since 1972 — founder Stan Werbin opened the shop in East Lansing with fifteen used instruments and no cash register, then spent fifty-plus years growing it into one of the largest specialty music retailers in the country while keeping it family-run (Stan still leads; daughter Lillian is the next generation). The store moved to its current home in a renovated old lodge hall in Lansing's Old Town district in 1983 and runs today with about forty employees, many tenured 20+ years. Their catalog is famously broad — Taylor, Martin, Fender, and Yamaha alongside Collings, Bourgeois, Lowden, McPherson, Santa Cruz, Goodall, and Atkin — and the in-house repair shop, a separate 3,000-square-foot space with a spray booth, inspects and sets up nearly every instrument they sell. A specialty music store that's outlasted every shift in retail and stays known for its repair expertise and customer care.
