Welcome back!

Just wanted to reiterate my initial premise pertaining to solid wood guitars

An Acoustic Guitar with solid wood top, back and sides will sound better, age better and develop character better than a guitar made with laminated anything.

In part one, I showed that you can get a very fine playing and sounding solid wood guitar for under $1,000 CAD. The under is one cent so there’s a bit of mcmarketing happening, but the facts stand and the RO-328 is a great instrument and trememdous value. However, some folks prefer the larger body and different voice that comes from a dreadnought style guitar, so here we go again, but this time with the Recording King RD-328.

The De-Facto Acoustic Build Part Two

Following the Second World War, interest in guitar increased including the desire for the guitar to be louder in order to be heard alongside other instruments such as banjo, mandolin and stand up bass. Where there had been both banjo orchestras and mandolin orchestras in the early part of the 20th century, guitar came to that game later, but the increasing reverence for Bluegrass and radio broadcasted shows like the Grande Ole Opry was bringing guitars more forward, How do you make an acoustic guitar louder? Well you could change the construction to something resonates louder, such as a resonator guitar, or you could make the body bigger so it can push more air. The second option outdid the first, and Martin led the way with their D series guitars, or dreadnoughts, where the name comes from the old name for battleships, a large, tough and loud entity.

The D-18 was released and as in Martin nomenclature the 1 indicated mahogany back and sides and the 8 referenced the body size. The D-28 is a very similar guitar but built with rosewood back and sides. Again, one can go have a nice argument about mahogany vs rosewood, but really it’s a personal decision. Since in this part two, I am looking at the Recording King RD-328, my comparison unit will be Martin’s D-28, specifically my own D-28 from the late seventies / early eighties.

In a current D-28, you will find a Sitka Spruce top over East Indian Rosewood sides and back. They sound wonderful with great projection and the sound you expect from spruce over rosewood. It’s become the acoustic by which many others measure themselves. Martin has been making them since before the Second World War, and to Martin’s credit, they have not farted around with a proven and good thing, The only issue with the D-28 is it’s price. MSRP looks to be about $3919 CAD. The D-28 is a fabulous guitar, will treat you well if you do the same for it, and do a decent job of holding its value over the next decades. (Note that back in 1960, you could buy a D-28 for about $200 - allowing for inflation and everything else, the current MSRP is a bit high - but supply and demand are real things not opinions). Yet, you have decided that you need/want a sitka over rosewood orchestra style acoustic but you don’t have the better part of $4,000 CAD hanging about. As a guitar geek, if I could go back in time like in the Stephen King novel 11-22-63 I would be bringing back guitars and not hamburger.

You Can Get Solid Sitka over Rosewood for Under $4K

I already told you that you can. Recording King that may solve your current needs and still give you a guitar that will hold up for years while you determine that the $4K spend is worth your while, and still get you a guitar that you can play today.

In this part two we will look at the Tonewood Series RD-328

The tops on the RD-328 are not the more common Sitka spruce tops, but the rarer and preferred Adirondack spruce tops, also called Red Spruce. These are two quite different woods, with the Adirondack respected for a wider range both dynamically and tonally. That’s why high end builders such as Boucher and custom builders like Burri (both Canadian) choose Adirondack Spruce. For whatever it matters to you, I like Adirondack spruce best, but even to my ears, the differences are subtle and will get lost in a loud gig.

Backs and sides are solid East Indian Rosewood. Whereas Martins are designed and assembled in Nazareth Pennsylvania, Recording King guitars are designed in the United States and assembled in China. Do labour costs contribute to lower selling prices? Of course they do, but the difference in cost is not all labour. Some element of pricing is the build quality and the decal on the headstock.

I have, courtesy of Recording King dealer, The Arts Music Store, an RD-328 at hand as I write this. I can speak openly and honestly because I am not paid to write this and don’t get freebies. I have spent hard earned money on lots of guitars and count Martins, Gibsons and Taylors in my present collection of played guitars.

I am doing a tone, fit and feel comparison with the guitar that I own that is closest to the RD-328 which is a long owned and regularly played Martin D-28. It is Sitka Spruce over East Indian Rosewood. Like the RD-328 it came with no pickup although it has one now.

My D-28 has a gentle V neck which I find very comfortable and the prominent Martin diamond shaped volute where the headstock meets the neck

The RD-328 is the same size body as my D-28 and the neck feels similar. I did not find the V on the RD-328 as aggressive as on the RO-328. The RD-328 initially seemed a bit dead so an evening of humidification was set and that changed things for the better. At the risk of sounding bored, the RD-328 sounds like what you would expect from a solid wood spruce over rosewood dreadnought. It’s pleasant in tone, and has nice dynamics whether you play finger style, with a thumb pick and fingers or with a flat pick. Unlike the strings on the RO-328, these strings were not dead, but still sound and feel very cheap so as I customarily do, I will recommend dropping about $15 on a good set of acoustic strings. The strings while not great do not enormously degrade the guitar. Coated strings will cost a bit more if you prefer them and that is as always a personal choice. My D-28 is strung with D’Addario XT 80/20 strings, 11-52.

Setup out of the box was good with nice nut slot depth, good action and decent neck relief. If it were my guitar, I would replace the plastic bridge pins with Tusq pins from GraphTech when I replaced the strings.

The Recording King sounds new, meaning it is less open and one might say less lively. The good thing about real wood is that it will open up over time and with playing. I did not feel the same spark with the RD-328 as I did with the RO-328 but that could be subjective given my preference for smaller bodied guitars.

As with the previous pair, the Martin has an ebony fingerboard, while the Recording King has a rosewood fingerboard. They are different woods, and while they respond differently from a tonality perspective, one may choose not to get one’s shorts in a knot. At least both fretboards are real wood. Can I hear a difference in my recording room between the fingerboards? Only in my imagination, there is so much more contribution from the rest of the guitar that the fingerboard wood is for the most part immaterial. At least it’s real wood.

Just as on the RO-328 there is no pickup pre-installed on the RD-328. And again, I would install one, just because I do and because I like the option of running DI to my interface as an alternative to miking the guitar. If I didn’t need a preamp because I was going to use a preamp in my DAW or plug into an amplifier that has a preamp that I like, such as my AER Compact 60, I would just go with the K&K Pure Pickup. They cost around $120 and you can self install if you are marginally handy. Or you could have a professional install it.

My Martin came with a hardshell case. The Recording King does not include a case, but the folks at The Arts Music Store put my evaluation unit in one of their third party hardshell OM body cases and the guitar fit perfectly. As always, ensure that the guitar remains properly humidified.

I found the gap between the RD-328 and my D-28 to be greater than in the first pair of guitars. I’m likely biased because I own and know the Martin very well, so my personal preference, is just that, personal. Comparing the RD-328 to similarly priced instruments made mostly of plywood (you can put all kinds of lipstick on a pig, ie fancy names, but a pig is still a pig) and it is my opinion that over time, the RD-328 will be much more satisfying. It will take some time to open up as do all solid wood guitars, whereas a laminate guitar has to be built to be optimal the day you pick it up because there is nothing there to open up over time. Plus at $999 CAD you are getting a really awesome solid wood guitar for about ¼ the cost of a “label” brand.

And that friends is the real point. We can get all uppity with the reality that Martins and Taylors and Gibsons are VERY expensive guitars. Part of that is their proven longevity, part of it is owner delight, part of it is related to a misplaced perception that something that is old is always better than something new and a lot of it is the name on the headstock.

Taylor and Martin do make guitars in the $1K range. They work but they are really entry level guitars and you could find an equivalent entry level guitar for considerably less. However good they are, they do not compare well against the Recording King for the simple reason that they are not solid wood. In part one, I shared my treatise on why solid wood and will not repeat it here.

Sound Comparison

I record these not to demonstrate my talent (I have very little) but to give you something for your own consideration. You will like what you like and that is all that matters. The Recording King and the Martin were recorded within minutes of each other in my playing room. Recordings where made using a RODE NT-1A microphone recorded directly into a Zoom F8 Field Recorder. The WAV originals were trimmed for content in Logic Pro X and exported as MP3 files. NO PLUGINS, tweaks, processing or anything else was done. The audio tracks are as raw as I can provide them. I will let you listen and see if you hear a difference and can identify which guitar is which. Full disclosure, the strings on the Martin are relatively new Martin MONEL strings, the strings on the Recording King are what it shipped with. The guitars are a Recording King RD-328 and a Martin D-28 and like last time, I will not tell you which is which.

Conclusions

I cannot be completely objective. I worked to earn the money to buy the D-28 because I wanted that guitar. There is a human element there that cannot be discounted. The reality is that while I believe that I hear a difference, and feel a difference when playing, the RD-328 is close to my Martin. This does not make the Martin less valuable to me, but it does tell me that if I were playing gigs, I might choose to invest in a Recording King instead of risking my very expensive Martin to load out and load in, particularly when one considers the variances of locations and sound. When I do play, my default setup involves a decent microphone, an AER amplifier and an Empress Mark II compressor as well as a Source Audio EQ2 equalizer unit. I used none of that for this article because I wanted to keep things as simple and raw as possible.

Thank you as always for reading and until next time, peace.