Howdy folks!

I’m going to start this article with a general statement. You are free to disagree of course, but please understand that this is not an argument I would participate in. Having played for over 45 years and owned a large number of acoustic guitars in that time, I am comfortable with the following statement.

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.

Why am I even getting engaged in this? Simply because there is this erroneous proposition that you cannot get a solid wood acoustic guitar until you are in the $3K CAD price range. You can. You cannot get one from Martin, Taylor or Gibson, but you can definitely get one. Or more.

The De-Facto Acoustic Build Part One

While you can start an interesting fracas by saying something like Mahogany is better for back and sides than Rosewood and then standing back to watch the fun, let’s bypass that entirely and look at the guitar that has really become the standard for acoustics over the last 60+ years. Lots of great guitars, but if you had to look for one as a checkpoint, and looked prior to the advent of the dreadnought body style, you’d be looking at an Orchestra model exemplified by the Martin 000-28. The 000-28 is a player’s guitar, not festooned with lots of fancy inlay, it doesn’t even come with a pickup (oh the horror!). It differs from the equally brilliant 000-18 by the wood used for the backs and sides.

In a current 000-28, 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 000-28 is it’s price. MSRP looks to be about $4189 CAD. The 000-28 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 000-28 for about $250 - 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. Dreadnought lovers, don’t worry, we will get there in part two!

That I am focusing on the Martin line has a reason, but the idea is the same for excellent guitars from Taylor and Gibson as well.

Can I Get Solid Sitka over Rosewood for Under $4K?

I already told you that you can. There is a company brand called 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.

Recording King is best known for their inexpensive laminate guitars and their lineup of resonator style guitars. What they are less well known for are their solid wood acoustics. They call these the Tonewood Reserve Series.

In the spruce over rosewood space, they have the RO-328 and the RD-328. Note immediately that these 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.

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 but 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 RO-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 RO-328 which is a long owned and well loved Martin 000-28EC. That means that Eric Clapton’s signature is inlayed subtly on the fingerboard. It is Sitka Spruce over East Indian Rosewood. It did not come from the factory with a pickup, so in that regard it is similar to the RO-328.

My 000-28EC has a V shaped neck. This is quite different in feel from the more common C shaped neck. It is neither better nor worse in my opinion, just different and very comfortable for my average sized sausage fingered hands. Like all Martins of this style, there is a prominent diamond shaped volute on the back of the neck at the headstock.

When I first picked up the RO-328 it was immediately apparent that the 000-28 is its design inspiration. Same body size, but a sharper V neck and same volute. The RO-328 has plenty of voice and sounds as you would expect a spruce over rosewood guitar to sound. It’s pleasant in tone, and has excellent dynamics whether you play finger style, with a thumb pick and fingers or with a flat pick. I will say that the strings that came on the guitar out of the box are crap. They were showing corrosion (common with a bronze string) and the low strings are pretty dead. Since with the exception of PRS guitars, my first course of action with any new guitar is to change the strings to suit me, I do not slam Recording King for this. A decent set of acoustic strings may set you back all of $15, more if you want coated strings. If I go coated, they are always D’Addario XT strings, and if I go uncoated (as I will typically) they will be Curt Mangan MONEL strings in my own custom gauge set, or if I have run out, Martin MONEL strings. Back to the guitar.

Sound is very good. My 000-28 is more open and has a wider tonal range. Some of this is due to the strings of course, but the other piece that one cannot ignore is that my 000-28EC has been played a lot in the twelve years that I have owned it, and I have no idea how much the original owner played it in the three years prior. The Recording King sounds new, meaning it is less open and one might say more tightly focused. The good thing about real wood is that it will open up over time and with playing.

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.

I noted that the RO-328 does not include any electronics in the form of a pickup. I do not see this as a negative. Most acoustics never get plugged in at all, so you cannot miss something that you never use. Moreover, and this is my opinion, I find a lot of acoustic guitars that come with some kind of pickup sound horrible plugged in. While it is easy to blame the PA or the acoustic amplifier and goodness knows that few of them handle an acoustic guitar well, most guitars include some form of piezo pickup if they come with one. Piezos seem to be split opinions. Folks love them or hate them, I have met very few guitarists who actually use them who are ambivalent. I do not like them. Over a decade ago, I installed the well respected Fishman under saddle transducer pickups in multiple guitars. Let me just say, I was rapidly disappointed and I never used them, so I call that money wasted. I then learned, from renowned guitarist, JP Cormier of the K&K pickup family. On his advice, I replaced one of the Fishmans (in an old Gibson Humminbird) with a K&K Pure Pickup. To my ear, the difference from the under saddle piezo to the three transducer K&K is night and day. I later learned that I could add a volume control to the Pure Pickup and after that learned about the K&K Trinity system which has a Pure Pickup, external preamp, and an in body boom microphone. I have since upgraded my existing K&K installs to the Trinity system. The famed Maton guitars from Australia use an in body microphone in addition to transducers and sound incredible, listen to anything by Tommy Emmanuel to hear them. If I owned either the RO-328 or RD-328 it would be a K&K kit ordered for them. If one must be able to amplify an acoustic guitar, best to use a better pickup for the job.

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. While I have a special humidifier in my playing rooms to keep a suitable humidity level for guitars, I would always recommend using a humidifier to protect your guitar, especially a solid wood guitar. I have had the greatest success when moving guitars in cases with the Oasis system. Just be sure to use distilled water in your guitar humidifiers. Tap water may be safe to drink but it contains minerals and deposits that will destroy your humidification device in short order.

Is the Recording King a better guitar than the Martin? In my opinion, it is not. While fit and finish are really very good, I think that the Martin is a better guitar. How much better? So much of this is subjective, so when it comes to playing live or recording, I believe that a good microphone and a skilled sound engineer can make either sound wonderful because they both start in such a good place. That said, for the money, I do not see how you could possibly do better than with a Recording King solid wood instrument.

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.

Why Solid Wood

There is a lot of spin put on laminated wood. Factually it is more dimensionally stable and less susceptible to damage caused by humidity or the lack thereof. We know this is true because of the success of what we know as plywood. Plywood is simply multiple layers (plys) of thin sheets glued together. Better plywoods use solid wood in each ply, cheaper grades use sawdust mixed with glues and stiffeners. That kind of plywood is great for siding and lousy for guitars. It doesn’t resonate well and it cannot move. A moving guitar is important and while we are most concerned that the top can move (avoid laminated tops at all costs), laminated sides and backs can never move as well as solid wood. It’s basic physics and marketing cannot change physical laws. Some laminates look lovely because the top level is a veneer of real wood. Veneer is an ultra thin slice of real wood adhered to the lower layers. This is all about look, and a nice veneer does nothing to alter tone, marketing messages regardless.

We are also seeing the use of non-wood products increasingly. Martin openly discloses that they use Richlite for fretboards in their lower cost models. While paper is for the most part, processed from wood pulp, calling Richlite a wood derivative is quite a stretch and to my fingers, it feels odd.

Your experiences will vary of course, because your world is different from mine. That said in all the years I have only found two laminate body acoustic guitars that I really liked the sound from. The first was a ‘70s BC Rich and I put my affection to faulty memory and not knowing anything about acoustic tone, and the second is the current Martin SC-13E which as I have written is a wonderful guitar but still a lot of money for a laminate instrument.

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 RO-328 and a Martin 000-28EC.

Conclusions

I cannot be completely objective. I worked to earn the money to buy the 000-28EC 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 RO-328 is VERY 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 couple of Recording Kings 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.

In part two, we are going to visit dreadnought land with a similar side by side between the Recording King RD-328 and my own early ‘80s Martin D-28.

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