The pre-war Martin tradition

The guitars Martin built between the late 1920s and the Second World War remain the reference point an entire wing of boutique building measures itself against — and the builders here make that claim themselves; the Atlas records it. The revival has named founders: Nick Kukich's Franklin Guitar Company has built OMs to the pre-war pattern since 1974 — among the first anywhere to take the form back up — and Eric Schoenberg's Bourgeois-voiced Soloists remade the case for the OM, "taking what's special from the old ones." John Slobod of Circa works so deep in the idiom that his model designations — 00-17, OM-18 — follow the old conventions outright. Lynn Dudenbostel builds herringbone 28-style replicas in Brazilian rosewood and Adirondack from Maryville, Tennessee. Julius Borges's OM-28 replicas keep the 1930s recipe with quiet modern accommodations — a truss rod, standard frets. Pre-War Guitars Co. of Roxboro, North Carolina put the claim in its name: dovetail necks, hot hide glue, torrefied tops, checked nitro. John Greven, ex-restoration foreman at Gruhn's and now semi-retired in Washington State, spent a career pursuing the big pre-war sounds. The idiom crosses the Atlantic in Alister Atkin's Canterbury workshop, whose Retrospective series works from the same patterns, and reaches Iowa in David Flammang's flat-tops, built with vintage pre-war acoustics as the tonal reference point. None of this is nostalgia for its own sake — it is a working argument, made one instrument at a time, that the old recipe was never exhausted.