PROJECT 91
That was Brazilian rosewood, but they were trying to get a better yield by going to three-piece backs, and then very quickly into the late’ 60s and’ 70s, they switched over to the East Indian rosewood. Now, today we have variants of Dalbergias that come from different countries, Guatemalan rosewood, for example. That’ s a good“ tweener” wood— falling between East Indian and Brazilian rosewood.
But, as luck would have it, there are people who bought Brazilian rosewood as an investment, or for something they thought they might use later in life, and maybe for one reason or another, it didn’ t work out for them. So, some of them started knocking on our door.“ Hey, we have this Brazilian rosewood. It’ s documented. Are you guys interested in buying it?” And some were really nice. Others were too small. We couldn’ t really do anything with the material. But we were able to cobble together enough for this project, which was really cool.
So, suddenly the project was actually doable … Yeah, it got me thinking that maybe we can really start taking a hard look at doing this. So, I got the team together, we sat down, and we really started looking through the old archives. We knew some of these guitars. We knew the first one was the Gene
Autry guitar. That sits currently in the Gene Autry Archives, not in the museum. They have it in some warehouse somewhere. We documented that guitar back when we did the Gene Autry edition. But a lot of the other ones, we don’ t have access to them, but we have done a lot of Authentic style guitars over the last 10, 15 years that really taught us a few things about what Martin was doing, and in those time periods.
One thing you’ ve not heard us talk about is that we’ re not calling this an Authentic Series, because in our world, an Authentic Series means that we have the physical guitar at our disposal, and we’ re able to go through that particular serial number with a finetoothed comb. And I’ m talking fingerboard width, neck shape, top thickness, barrel— everything. And those details get duplicated as closely as we can do today. With Project 91, we don’ t have access to all of these guitars. But we do have enough knowledge to inform the project. We’ ve got some really good intel on probably a good six to eight of them. We have one here in the museum that we own. And that’ s a later one from the 1940s.
Gary Lambert, who has been here 47 years, created a really detailed spreadsheet based on what we found in our archives— like when snowflakes stopped
“ WE’ RE BUILDING THESE IN A MODERN ERA, OF COURSE, BUT WHEREVER IT TRULY MATTERS TO THE SOUND AND STRUCTURE, WE’ VE LEANED HARD INTO THE PERIOD-CORRECT METHODS”
COLLECTIBLE GUITAR | 91