1980 Guild D-35 Acoustic

This is my well worn, but beloved Guild acoustic. It is presently modified with a Fishman Matrix System preamp and pickup. I also shaved the neck down and tung oiled it. I couldn't stand that stickiness associated with aging nitro-cellulose lacquer. It plays like butter now though! (who cares if I devalued it? I'm not selling it, and playability takes precedence to me....which is why I'm not a collector, I'm a player lol)

I inherited this guitar in the early 90s. Someone my Mom was seeing up and disappeared with a chunk of my Mom's stuff and left only this behind. As such, she passed it on to me. I was excited to get a Guild acoustic, that's for sure. I was brought up in the mindset that Guilds and Martins were the best (with a bias toward Guild over Martin). However, the guitar kind of just got relegated to being "just" an acoustic, as I was never able to really get it to play or sound too well. I just attributed it to being a guitar that just didn't gel with me, and actually traded it to my friend Fern in exchange for a 4 track recorder.

Years later, he wasn't using it, and sold it back to me. He had it detuned in his closet. As I started to restring it back up to pitch, I was hearing popping noises, and the guitar going more and more flat. Turns out that the neck heel was separating from the heel (YIKES!). I detuned it again, moved cross country, and got a job at a music store.

I figured I would get it fixed, sell it, and get an acoustic I really liked, since I never felt the love from the Guild. The tech there reglued the neck for me, and when I played it afterwards, it was a completely new instrument. It seems that the neck was probably coming unglued for some time. But after the repair, the guitar just had a tone, a feel, and life that I couldn't or wouldn't dare part with. Soon after that, I sanded down the neck, as I knew this was a keeper.

In 2010 I added the Fishman Matrix system. This guitar is pretty worn and beaten. It's not a beauty by any means, but plays and sounds amazing. It gets a lot of use for lessons, and for everything I do acoustically. It has an all Mahogany neck and body which gives the guitar an inherently deep tone, so I string with brighter 80/20 bronze strings, and use brass bridge pins. With 12s, it's almost perfectly intonated as well. A definite keeper!


-={E-Mail Jake}=-