what year did martin start using steel strings?
 

we were at gc hollywood today, and there was what was labeled as a 1902 martin. i had been under the impression that martins that age were nylon string, but this one was using steel. on the other hand, it looked like they were added later, and the top was bellying. anyone here know if a 1902 martin parlor would have come with nylon or steel?

a 1902 would have more than likely been braced for gut strings, but they did start putting steel strings on around the turn of the century. it could have gone either way. the bracing for steel strings definitely developed after they started using the steel strings on what would have been gut stringed instruments. if your guitar was heavily bellied, it was probably fan braced.

http://www.guitar-maker.com/Pages/histSSG.html

German immigrants to America started making guitars with an X-brace under the soundboard. Whether or not Martin developed this himself is not known, but he certainly made it his own, by the 1850's most of his guitars were built this way. The advantage of this arrangement was probably mainly commercial at this stage, as the X-brace used less wood than Torres' fan-struts. The main virtue of the X-brace lay unsuspected by makers and players alike for the next fifty years.

One of the big disadvantages of the early guitar was its lack of volume. Torres made great improvements with the wider bodies and fan-strutting of his guitars, but American guitarists wanted an instrument which could hold its own when played alongside much louder banjos, mandolins and fiddles at barn dances and the like. They got what they wanted around 1900, when steel strings came out. But steel strings exert more than double the tension on a guitar soundboard that gut strings do. A slight strengthening of the X-brace was all that was needed to cope with the extra tension, and by the 1920's it had become an industry standard for the steel-string guitar.

Neither. A 1902 Martin would have been built with gut strings in mind. Steel strings were around by that point, brought to North America mainly by Italian immigrants who used steel strings on both their mandolins and their guitars. But nylon hadn't been invented yet, and steel strings hadn't yet achieved the market dominance they'd have some twenty five years later.

One of the design features that commonly confuses people trying to restring old parlor guitars that they find - whether built by Martin or some other firm - is that these old guitars usually have pin bridges on them.

Nowadays that's sort of a code that's evolved: pin bridges = steel strings. But back then pin bridges were used with gut strings. The player would tie a knot in the end of the string and the pin would wedge it into place at the bridge.

Ball end steel strings were a later adaptation used to fit this previously invented pin bridge.

Anyway, the dimwits at Guitar Center Hollywood are threatening the structural integrity of that old Martin by putting steel strings on it. What they should do is pull those strings off immediately and replace them with ball end nylon strings - Ernie Ball makes a set, and so does LaBella.

So, Patticake, will you be good enough to call the manager and tell him or her this, or should I do it from here in Alaska?

It needs to be the manager who's spoken to - your average heavy metal doofus working as a sales clerk at Guitar Center is probably not someone with whom we want to entrust the future of an old Martin....


Wade Hampton Miller

Now, now Wade . . . be nice.

Even if he is a dufus.

wade, it looked to me like someone had "restored" the guitar so that the tuners were not original, and seemed to be for steel. that's why i was very puzzled.

Well, unless the top got rebraced at some point, the guitar is not designed for the added tension of steel strings. From your description of it, it sounds as though the usual mistake of assuming that a pin bridge means steel strings is having its usual effect: the top is bellying.

As for the tuners not being original, I haven't seen the guitar, so I can't answer that for certain. But the use of big fat rollers on classical guitars versus smaller steel rollers on steel string instruments is something else that I'm pretty sure evolved some time after this guitar was built. So, again, it could easily have the sort of tuners we associate with steel string slothead guitars nowadays, but they could be original to the instrument.

Anyway, Martin didn't start bracing their guitars for steel strings until the late 1920's - 1927 or 1928, somewhere in there. I don't know whether the Martin company would have braced a guitar for steel strings on special order as early as 1902, but I kind of doubt it. So it's unquestionably too early to have been braced as a steel string guitar in terms of everyday general production, and I suspect that it's also too early to have been intended for steel strings even on a special order basis.

Hope that makes sense.


whm

According to Walter Carter's book The Martin Book, A Complete History of Martin Guitars: Martin took a cautious approach, reviving Style 17 in Size 2 only in 1922, fitting it with a heavier-braced mahogany top and steel strings. The price of the 2-17 was right: $25. Martin sold 344 of them in 1922 -- more than the company's total annual production in many years of the previous decade. Sales more than doubled the next year, and the 2-17 peaked in 1926 with an astounding production of 1300 (28 per cent of all guitars made that year).
Steel strings spread quickly: to Style 18 guitars in 1923, Style 28 models in 1925 and across the line by the end of the decade.

Now I seriously want a classical with a pin bridge, I hate tying classical bridge strings. I normally use the La Bella ball ends but you still have to tie the high E as it can often slip the ball.