Master Guitar

This is an awesome guitar! I bought it from a local music store in 1981 - I used a car for collateral to borrow the money, it took me a year to pay it off and I've never regretted it. I wanted an acoustic that felt as close as I could get to my Gibson ES-175. I was playing at a NAMM show in Nashville in '98 and Martin had the biggest booth there. I thought I'd go see if I could pick up another one (that's when I met Stephen Stills) and discovered the model had been discontinued. Crap! But there's something about this one that makes it unique. A good friend of mine who was a world class luthier named Bob Abernathy did some work on this for me. Bob was a one-of-a-kind person in general but his luthier skills were unparalleled. He had some pretty big-time connections. I bought a pair of floor monitors that he'd built (still have 'em) that were on the European leg of the Rolling Stones Steel Wheels tour. He built all kinds of stringed instruments and his guitars started at about $5,000.00 - this was in the eighties - way out of my range at the time! He built violins, violas, cellos, upright basses, harps, dulcimers, ukuleles - if it had strings and was made out of wood he could build it, and it would be one of the best in the world. His clients were some of the biggest names in the classical music world. He was one of only four people in the world who were considered experts on Old Testament Temple instruments and the only Gentile one! For this guitar he hand carved a saddle out of bone. This lowered the action even more than it already was and the intonation is just perfect. Unfortunately Bob passed away a few years ago. Everyone who's worked on this guitar refuses to mess with Bob's hand carved saddle. They work around it and relate whatever they're working on to it rather than try to change anything about it. Everyone who knows anything about this kind of thing has commented on how special this saddle is. It's a very small thing that makes a huge difference and is now irreplaceable - kind of like Bob himself.