I cannot see why a company like Martin Guitars which has made such beautiful instruments for so many years might create something like an aluminium guitar. It's almost a grotesque-----a sad parody of all the work that has gone before. When Martin made a guitar for the Bicentenial celebration of the USA in 1976 I thought it a rather tacky move, but I accepted it in the long run. I never thought of buying one though. Apparently very few other people bought them either. When I won a D-76 Martin in a raffle after spending $3.00 on two tickets, I was happy about it because the guitar I'd been playing was less than I wanted it to be for a record I was recording at that time. But this aluminum thingie is another step down the wrong road in a nation where folks accept Eisenhower's sterile fast food roads over the grace and pace of a Route 66 and $2.00 bottles of tap water over what was in my lifetime a great drink right from the water taps of Chicago tenaments.

The Martin D-76 was a good guitar even though it was an attempt to market the American Eagle instead of superior craftsmanship, but an aluminum Martin rivals, and is not much more charismatic then the old Gene Autry guitars of my youth ---ones made of plastic.

Just my opinion.

Art Thieme