How the Orchestra Model Went from a Flop to Become One of the Most Popular Guitar Types

1932 Martin OM-28. Photo: David LevineThe orchestra model is perhaps the most important guitar style C.F. Martin & Co. made in the 20th century. It was the company’s first six-string, 14-fret flattop guitar and it created the template for what we now think of as the modern steel-string guitar. After the dreadnought, the OM is probably the most popular 14-fret flattop guitar out there. The first OMs were built by Martin in 1929, and today, almost every modern guitar builder inspired by the venerable company builds an OM of some kind. All in all, the OM has done very well for itself, especially considering it was rejected by its intended audience and Martin stopped building the model in 1933, barely four years after it was introduced.

What is it about the OM that inspires players? Probably the most important thing is the way it balances playing comfort with performance. Because it has a relatively shallow body with a pinched-in waist, the guitar sits very easily in your lap. Sonically, the tone is balanced with the bass, midrange, and treble all having equal weight. Because of the long scale and higher string tension, the guitar responds well to a light fingerstyle touch, but you can still dig in with a flatpick and not overdrive it. The OM may not have the volume to power a jazz band or the bass response to drive a bluegrass band, but it can handle just about every other style you can think of without compromise.

In this feature, I’ll trace the OM’s development and evolution throughout the nearly 100 years since its introduction, exploring why it faded into obscurity before becoming one of the most common body styles, favored by players of all stripes. 

In the BeginningSo, why was this guitar a flop when it was first built? The story of the OM begins in 1929, an anxious year at the end of a tempestuous decade for the fretted instrument industry. At the time, it must have seemed that every two or three years, a new fad or trend came along that required a new batch of instruments to be designed and built even as older, established styles were abandoned. As the new decade began, for example, builders had to deal with the steep decline in mandolin sales. Mandolins were only a small part of Martin’s business, so they didn’t feel the sting, but it was a major blow to Gibson, one of their competitors. 

To try to slow the collapse of their mandolin sales, Gibson hired Lloyd Loar, an acoustic engineer and musician, to help design and promote the new Master Model series. This line included the F-5 mandolin, the H-5 mandola, the K-5 mandocello, and the L-5 guitar. Introduced in 1922, these instruments were beautifully crafted with carved maple backs and carved spruce tops with violin-style f-holes. But the effort was too little, too late, and sales were so poor that Gibson fired Loar in 1924. Soon after that, the company dropped the K-5 and the H-5 from the line, and while it continued to build the F-5, very few were sold. The L-5, though, would make a major impact a few years later.

Even as the mandolin was fading, the popularity of jazz was on the rise. Musicians found the loud, crisp tone of the four-string banjo was the perfect rhythm instrument to drive a large dance band, and sales skyrocketed. Older banjo makers like Vega and Bacon began competing with newcomers like Gibson and Paramount to see who could invent the loudest, brightest-sounding banjo. Even drum companies like Ludwig, Leedy, and Slingerland started making banjos. (Why not? After all, a banjo is basically a drum with a neck.) In 1923, Martin started building banjos but realized pretty quickly that part of the market wasn’t for them and, after making 96 instruments, abandoned the effort in 1926.

Martin’s biggest success in the 1920s came with the popularity of Hawaiian music, one of the first major musical fads of the 20th century. In the middle of the decade, the Nazareth, Pennsylvania–based company was making twice as many ukuleles as guitars, and it would not be unfair to say that for much of the period Martin was a ukulele company that made guitars. Along with the ukulele, the Hawaiian steel guitar technique entranced a generation of guitarists. Martin began building guitars with stouter bracing to counteract the heavier tension of the steel strings players favored.

In 1925, new methods of recording using microphones and tube amps were created that could capture more bass response and a wider dynamic range than before, and bands realized they didn’t need to rely on the piercing sound of the banjo for rhythm. Players began searching for a replacement for the clatter of the banjo, and the first thing they tried was the tenor guitar, which was basically a tenor banjo neck fitted to a guitar body. Martin started making tenor guitars in 1927 and they were very successful from the start—in the first year, more than 1,200 of them accounted for about 20 percent of the company’s total guitar production. 

Originally, Martin built tenor guitars using their smallest bodies, but in the quest for more volume, and at the insistent urging of one its big dealers, the Carl Fischer Company, it developed a new model based on the 0, or concert-size guitar. In early 1929, Martin took its 12-fret body shape and shortened the upper bout, giving it a squared-off appearance. The guitar maker also moved the bridge away from the soundhole and closer to the center of the top, which produced a louder, more resonant tone. Martin fitted the solid headstock with banjo tuners. At first, the new tenor guitar, which later came to be known as the 0-18T, was only available from Carl Fischer, but it was such a hit with banjo players looking for a mellower tone that Martin soon made it available to everyone. 

A Fortuitous CollaborationPerhaps because of the success of Martin’s tenor guitars, when plectrum banjoist Perry Bechtel approached the company about making a new guitar model, the company was inclined to listen. Bechtel played banjo and guitar in various bands in Atlanta and taught at the Cable Piano Company, which, despite what the name would suggest, was a full-line music store. Bechtel knew the banjo was on its way out, and he was looking for a guitar to replace it. At the time, he was playing a Gibson Style O Artist, an archtop guitar with an unusual shape and a cutaway that left 15 frets clear of the body on the treble side. 

Bechtel’s original Martin guitar has been missing for decades, and most likely it was destroyed in 1935 when the Cable Piano Company was devastated by a fire. (Bechtel maintained a teaching studio in the building and most likely stored his Martin guitar there.) In 2009, John Woodland was doing some research in the Martin archives and came across the correspondence between the Cable Piano Company and Martin discussing Bechtel’s special order. It turns out the original OM was different in number of ways from the production model. 

Martin Perry Bechtel 000-28. Courtesy of Martin GuitarTo start with, Bechtel requested a 15-fret neck, but Martin countered with a 14-fret design. The body would be based on the 000 (auditorium) size and, like the 0-18T, the upper bout would be shortened and squared off. The scale length would be 25.4 inches and the nut width would be 1-13/16 inches, a bit narrower than the then-standard 1-7/8 inches width. The neck and headstock would be bound in ivoroid and the guitar would have a slotted headstock. Initially, Bechtel wanted a custom inlay on the headstock overlay, but he finally settled on the style-45 torch inlay. Like the 12-fret guitars Martin was building at the time, the new instrument was fitted with a pyramid-style bridge. It may have had a teardrop-shaped pickguard, a feature Bechtel requested, but we don’t know for sure.

It’s a sign of how eager Martin was to find a new market that they designed, built, and shipped Bechtel’s new guitar in about six weeks. At first Bechtel liked the guitar and praised it for its tone and playability. But he quickly discovered it didn’t have the punch, volume, and focused tone that he needed to drive a large jazz band. Judging from photographs from the early 1930s, within a couple of years Bechtel was back to playing Gibson archtops, although he was using an L-5 instead of a Style O Artist.

The new 14-fret guitar, which was listed in Martin’s ledgers as the 000-28 Special, the 000-28 Perry Bechtel, or the 000-28 Prof. Model, began to garner interest with dealers and musicians. We don’t know for sure when Martin switched to a solid headstock, but a 000-28 Special from this period has surfaced, and it has a slotted headstock. 

In 1930, the new instrument, now dubbed the OM (orchestra model), was first listed in the Martin catalog, with five different models offered: the mahogany OM-18, the rosewood OM-28, the abalone trimmed OM-45, and the OM-45 Deluxe, which featured an inlaid pickguard and bridge. Martin also made an OM-18P, which had a plectrum banjo-style neck.

Even though the catalog touted the OM as “designed especially for plectrum work in orchestras,” jazz guitarists of the day found the flattop design wasn’t loud enough for band work, and they increasingly turned to archtops. The new guitar did find fans on the West Coast, though, and singing cowboys like Roy Rogers, who played an OM-45 Deluxe, and various members of his band the Sons of the Pioneers found the model well suited to their smooth harmony singing style.

Changes Inside and OutThe OM went through a number of cosmetic and structural changes during its brief early existence. The first version, made in late 1929, had a solid headstock with banjo tuners, a small teardrop pickguard, and a straight, pyramid bridge. The nut width was 1-3/4 inches. By the time the OM was pictured in the 1930 catalog, the pyramid bridge was replaced with a belly bridge, which did a better job of countering the tension of the steel strings. 

1930 Martin OM-28. Photo: David LevineIn 1931, Martin went from using banjo tuners to right-angle Grover G-98s. The maker presumably used banjo tuners because it initially thought the market for the guitar was among banjo players, but quickly discovered the four-to-one tuning ratio just didn’t work with the heavy strings used on guitar. And in 1932, Martin switched from the small teardrop-shaped pickguard to the larger shape still seen on most of its guitars to this day. 

It became clear early on that the OM was not catching on with players in dance bands and jazz orchestras as Martin hoped it would, but other musicians took notice of the 14-fret design and started asking Martin to make other guitars in that style. The first model it built was the 0-18, which was quickly followed by the 00-18. In 1931, Martin started working on a line of archtop guitars to compete directly with Gibson. At the same time, the Pennsylvania company introduced the first dreadnoughts under its own name. (Martin had exclusively built dreads for the Oliver Ditson until that company went out of business, in 1930. But the stories of the Martin archtops and the dreadnoughts are tales for another time.)

With the new, louder guitars coming out, Martin clearly felt there was no need for the OM as a standalone model. In 1933, the maker changed the name of the OM to the 000. Those early 000s had the same specs as the OM, such as the long, 25.4-inch scale length and the 1-3/4-inch nut width, but in 1934 the guitar was redesigned with a shorter 24.9-inch scale length. And that was the end of the original run of OM guitars. From then until the late 1950s, Martin used the orchestra model designation in its catalogs to refer to any guitar with a 14th-fret neck-to-body junction. And just like that, the guitar that ushered in the modern era of flattop guitars was forgotten.

A Brilliant RevivalFast forward to the 1960s, when the urban folk and blues revivals—as well as the growing popularity of bluegrass—inspired musicians to seek out vintage instruments to more authentically perform the old songs they were resurrecting. As they began to dig up old steel-strings, guitarists discovered that those from the 1920s, ’30s, and early ’40s were built a little differently than modern guitars and tended to have a richer, more complex sound. 

Stefan Grossman performing with his 1930 Martin OM-45 in 1971 at Ruisrock in Finland.One of the first players to focus on the original OM was Stefan Grossman, a talented fingerpicker and teacher who studied with the Reverend Gary Davis and played with the Even Dozen Jug Band, a short-lived group that also included David Grisman, John Sebastian, Maria Muldaur (then Maria D’Amato), and Joshua Rifkin, an important figure in the early 1970s ragtime revival. 

In 1966 Grossman purchased a 1930 OM-45 from the instrument dealer Jon Lundberg. Grossman played the guitar extensively for the rest of the decade, taking it with him during a stay in England. While he was there, he introduced British players like John Renbourn to the model. In the early 1970s, Grossman sold the OM-45 for the then-high price of $9,000. Grossman experimented with other new and vintage guitars before coming across a luthier named Nick Kukich, who built guitars under the Franklin name.

Kukich was one of the only guitar builders in the 1970s and 1980s who focused on OM guitars, and he estimates that about 70 percent of all the guitars he has built were OMs. While working at a store called Strings ’n’ Things in Detroit, in the early 1970s, he bought a beat-up 1930 OM-28 with banjo tuners, and when he took it apart to repair it, he carefully measured every part. He had built a few guitars by then, but getting his hands on a 1930 Martin and seeing how it was constructed pushed his own craft to the next level. 

Frankilin OM. Photo: Kate Martin/Gryphon Stringed InstrumentsGrossman eventually bought three Franklin OMs and inspired a host of other players to use Franklins, including the British fingerstylist Renbourn. For a decade or so, Franklins were just about the only OMs players could easily try out, and this accessibility helped raise the profile of the guitar to modern audiences.

Another player from the 1960s who is associated with the OM is Eric Schoenberg, who has done more than anyone to reintroduce the OM to the modern world. Schoenberg is a teacher, historian, shop proprietor, and an excellent guitarist. His 1971 LP, The New Ragtime Guitar, which he recorded with his cousin Dave Laibman, inspired countless players to take up the style. He had been obsessed with vintage guitars since the early 1960s, but he found the OM to have a unique, almost magical blend of projection, tone, responsiveness, and subtlety. 

Schoenberg soon learned that original OMs were extremely scarce, and many of the instruments that did show up were in rough condition. He started asking Martin to reintroduce the model and in 1969, he ordered six guitars through the Folklore Center in New York. These instruments were labeled SOM-28 (S for Special), and they were the first OMs Martin had made since 1933. In 1977, now working at his own guitar store, he convinced Martin to make six OM-45s.

Eric Schoenberg with a pair of OMs from the early 1930s. Photo: Joey LustermanIn 1986, Schoenberg and Martin began a collaboration where Schoenberg would supply tonewoods and a top voiced and tuned by the luthier Dana Bourgeois, and later TJ Thompson, which Martin would then assemble and finish with nitrocellulose lacquer. The guitars were sold under the Schoenberg name and warrantied by him, but they are included in Martin’s serial number sequence.

The Schoenberg guitars were not replicas of vintage guitars, but were instead a blend of vintage and modern features. The Soloist, for example, was built with a cutaway, a modern feature Schoenberg wanted from his earliest playing days. The Martin-Schoenberg project ended in 1991, but Schoenberg has continued to have guitars built by various luthiers to his specifications.

During their partnership, Martin only built about 195 Schoenberg guitars, but the experience demonstrated the need for a regular production OM. Players had been ordering OMs from the Custom Shop since it opened in 1977, but in 1993 Martin added the OM-21 to the price list, 60 years after the OM was first dropped from the line. This was perhaps an odd choice to add to the standard line since Martin never made an OM-21. 

Martin did build OM-28s and OM-18s, but rather than add them to standard line, they were part of various vintage reissue series like the Golden Era, the Marquis, and the Authentic series. The company also made a number of Signature Edition OMs for players like Rory Block and Paul Simon. One of the most popular was the cutaway OM designed with Laurence Juber, an excellent guitarist who played with Paul McCartney and Wings. 

Schoenberg Soloist. Photo: Kate Martin/Gryphon Stringed InstrumentsIn 1990, Martin finally added a few OM variations to the standard line, including the OM-28 and the abalone trimmed OM-42. More recently, an OM-28 was introduced with the Modern Deluxe Series, a line of that combines classic guitar building techniques, such as hide-glue construction and wooden binding, with modern elements like carbon fiber bridge plate, EVO frets, and torrefied spruce tops.

A Versatile PlatformInspired by the example of Nick Kukich of Franklin Guitars, other luthiers started to recognize the potential of the OM and make their own versions. Independently, Richard Hoover of the Santa Cruz Guitar Company started offering small-bodied guitars in the late 1970s with the introduction of his H model, then began making OMs in the early 1980s at the request of a Japanese distributor. In the next few years, just about every builder of note offered their take on the classic design, including Collings, Bourgeois, Froggy Bottom, Larrivée, and Huss & Dalton, to name just a few. Oddly, Martin’s biggest competitors, Gibson and Taylor, never made an OM, although both companies have offered their versions of Martin’s other popular model, the dreadnought.

Because examples of original OMs were so scarce, and so few people had actually seen one in person, the model’s specs weren’t fixed in the public’s mind. If you were going to build a guitar based on a herringbone D-28, for example, there was very little you could change without getting pushback from players. Consequently, luthiers felt free to experiment with tonewoods, and it was not unusual to find OMs made with redwood, cedar, or mahogany tops and backs and sides from wenge, blackwood, cocobolo, or any of the other exotic woods that were available. One of John Renbourn’s Franklin OM’s was made of koa, something Martin never did. Builders also played with the OM’s dimensions. A common modification was to make the guitar body deeper, which produced more volume without changing the character of the tone.

The OM holds an unusual place in the guitar world. It is a historically important guitar that paradoxically has very little history. The Gibson L-5, for example, is so associated with jazz that it’s hard to imagine it playing any other style, even though Maybelle Carter laid the foundation of country guitar using one. Because the original OM was only available for a brief period, and so few have survived, it is not associated with any particular style of music or player. 

And even though early champions of the model, like Eric Schoenberg and Stefan Grossman, discovered the guitar was perfect for older styles like ragtime and fingerpicking blues, they always stressed the OM was a great guitar for just about any style of music from any era. Happily, now that there are so many new OMs available, players are catching on to how well the guitars perform in different musical settings. Players like Julian Lage and John Mayer, among many others, are using the unique virtues of OMs to take their music to new places. And that’s not a bad legacy for a guitar that flopped when it was first introduced nearly a century ago.

A Shopper’s Guide to New OM OptionsJust as with any type of steel-string design, there have never been more choices for orchestra models at all price points, with a wide range of features and tonewood options. For a good starter OM, check out something like the no-frills Eastman PCH1-OM ($349 street), with its torrefied Sitka spruce top and laminated sapele back and sides, or, for all-solid construction, the Eastman E1OM ($599).

If you’re seeking an affordable, gig-ready acoustic-electric OM, you might look into the Fender PO-220E ($829.99), which is outfitted with Fishman-designed electronics, or the Guild OM-140CE ($869), also with a Fishman pickup, as well as a smooth cutaway. 

Dipping into the four-figure range, some good all-solid options include models like the Larrivée OM-03 ($1,883.89) with Sitka spruce top and mahogany back and sides, and the Eastman E20OM ($1,839) with torrefied Sitka spruce soundboard and rosewood back and sides. A collaboration between Bourgeois and Eastman, the Sitka spruce and mahogany Touchstone Series Country Boy OM ($2,699) is a boutique guitar at a relatively affordable price.

You can’t go wrong with an OM from the inventor of the model—C.F. Martin & Co.—which offers a handful of different options, from the restrained design of the OM-21 ($2,999) to the venerable OM-28 ($3,339–$3,799) to the fancy OM-42 ($6,399) to the wild-looking OM-45 John Mayer 20th Anniversary ($18,499). Reissue models with period-correct details like the OM-28 Authentic 1931 and OM-18 Authentic 1933 have in recent years been retired, but do surface on the used market. 

If you’ve got five grand or more to splurge, then it’s definitely worth looking into a new OM from one of the boutique makers. Builders like Bourgeois, Collings (see review of the new OM1 A Hill Country here), Huss & Dalton, and Santa Cruz Guitar Company offer OMs across their various series, in both stock models and custom orders with a large variety of options for wood selection, ornamentation, and other features. Some of the earliest proponents of the OM, Franklin Guitar Company and Schoenberg, still offer custom OMs in limited numbers as well.

In short, the options are staggering. —Adam Perlmutter