Martin Custom 15 Pre HD 28 1986-New Lower Price! Free Ship!

1986 Martin Custom 15 (pre HD28) in great condition with awesome pickup system. Must move quick! Some scratches here and there including a few on the back of neck, a small bit of lacquer split at the back of the bridge (it happens), an added nickel-plated strap pin in the heel, minor scuff marks and dings on the East Indian Rosewood back, sides, and rash on the Sitka spruce top behind bridge. Probably will need a fret dressing soon, but life left.

Has a very nice Dana Bourgeois dual pickup system pro installed (transducer and piezo w/mini slider in soundhole. Added Anderson tortoise pickguard that looks amazing. Also added Waverly vintage white open back tuners. Added bone pins. The sound is very Martin-like with dry booming bass and this one has a nice cutting treble. Plays like a dream. Live is a banjo killer's dream acoustic and live plugged in is simply amazing. Same sound only loud and scalable w/pup combo slider. Ships with nice Victoria case w/blue plush interior. Clean.

 Some History Behind the Custom 15 from Stan Jay and The Mandolin Bros. The story behind the Martin “Custom 15” which is not, by the way, labeled as such, but only as “Custom,” is quite interesting and one we love to tell the smallest children in the family on the night before the anniversary of C F Martin, Sr. coming to America. Now, children, in the winter of early 1977 a Staten Island company that had become a C F Martin Guitar dealer only six months earlier – before that they had sold just vintage instruments – pulled into Nazareth for a meeting with then president Frank Herbert Martin. We (why yes, that would be Stan Jay and Hap Kuffner, the original Mandolin Brothers) proposed, even though C F Martin did not have a Custom Shop, that Martin especially build us, on an exclusive basis, 250 “1934 Reissue” D-28 Herringbones (based on the woods and techniques that were available in 1977) and 91 “1939 Reissue” D-45s. Remember that no guitar company at this time had ever come out with any sort of “Reissue” style guitar. Frank Herbert thought about it for about 45 seconds and said “Sure, we can do that.” And so it transpired that Martin began shipping guitars to this audacious New York firm and guess what? Every single guitar sold within days or a week of arriving. Our customers went crazy for them! We couldn't get them fast enough. This happy history continued unabated and without incident for around three years. It took exactly that long a period of time before “other dealers” around the country realized that they were missing something important and so they began to gather around the Martin factory, at night, in loin cloths with lit torches and primitive drums made from coconut shells and squirrel hides demanding to know, if the Martin Company could make such exciting new previously unheard of guitars for Mandolin Brothers, why couldn’t they make similar guitars for them? C F Martin had an exclusive with us for those guitars and they couldn’t make these guitars for other suitors, so they did the politically acceptable thing and in 1980 came out with a new model that had no name, just “Custom” on the neck block, and called it “Custom 15,” possibly because it was the 15th prototype they might have produced – we really don’t know the actual reason for the name; we’re just supposing. Other dealers were apparently satisfied to get access to an HD-28 made to some, but not all, prewar specifications including an aging toner Sitka top, East Indian rosewood sides, back and headplate, a tortoise shell type teardrop pickguard with beveled edges, scalloped bracing, a long, glued-in, bridge saddle, grained ivoroid body bindings, heel cap and end graft, a square-ish headstock design, six modern tuners, 7 etched diamond and snowflake fingerboard inlays in 5 fret positions, a modified V-shaped neck, a 1 11/16th” nut and bridge string spacing of 2 1/8th”. This interim “Custom 15” model remained in the line until 1995 at which time the name changed first to HD-28VR (because it had rosewood sides and back but all D-28s are rosewood) and then to the more likely name of HD-28V. One thing that our special guitar had (that Martin ceased doing on the “Custom 15” around 1984) was that it had a slightly larger V-shaped neck (at a time when none of the regular line Martin guitars had any kind of V-shaped neck) and a non-adjustable square bar truss rod which combination, as you know from hearing the D-18 Authentic, is a gift from the gods to acoustic six-string players. A larger neck and a non-adjustable truss rod are to guitars as Dolby Stereo was to movies starting in 1976. It makes the sound vibrant, airy, transparent, punchy and powerful. Our original approximately 341 guitars have become legendary in the history of 20th Century production lutherie. They bring collector prices and the people who are lucky enough own them.