BLUEPRINT: Martin Custom Shop Super Dreadnought

Go big or go home, as they say – and a new guitar design from Martin, the company that gave birth to the Dreadnought in the early 1900s, certainly does that, though more subtly than you might think. The Super Dreadnought, recently debuted by Martin’s Custom Shop, takes the classic square-shouldered, bass-rich design that’s been copied by nearly every acoustic maker in the world and enlarges it even further. The result is a louder, grander instrument that “hits you in the chest” when you play. But does it only boom or can it whisper, too? And how do you make a larger guitar feel comfortable under the arm of both strummers and fingerstylists alike?

These were the challenges that Scott Sasser, director of Martin’s Custom Shop, and Tim Teel, director of instrument design, faced when they upscaled the most influential acoustic in the world. And while the initial release is limited to two identically priced Custom Shop models, one in Guatemalan rosewood and the other in koa, it seems there are plans afoot for the Super Dreadnought to become a Standard line instrument thanks to its stellar performance in the hands of a diverse range of early adopters. We join Scott and Tim to find out what the big deal is…

How did the idea for the new Super Dreadnought come about?

“Fred Greene [Martin’s vice president of product] and I took a trip up to Fishman prior to the pandemic, back in 2019 or maybe a little bit before that. This was when. So I said to Fred, ‘There you go, Fred, let’s just call it the ‘Supernaut’,’ and we had a laugh about that.