A heavily modified Martin D18 built from rare Ovanko wood has survived 700 live shows, binding loss, tape repairs, and floodwater submersion. The guitar's tone deepened after the floods, and despite its battered appearance, it remains reliable and beautiful to play.
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What's up everybody, welcome back to another little piece of gear show, if that's okay with y'all. This is my primary gigging guitar. If you've ever seen me live, I've probably had this in my hand. There's like a 99.5% chance I've been playing this guitar. This is my Martin And I'll explain what model it is because it's weird. It's a Martin, I'll say that to start. It's a Wankelwood, um, and it's beautiful. It has been beat to hell. You can see there's masking tape on here, the binding's falling off everywhere. Um, there is a Fishman enhanced pickup in here. I think it's a VTX enhanced— a Matrix VT enhanced, sorry. Um, but this thing is my primary road guitar. Because Fishman does such a good job with pickups, and this thing is a workhorse. I probably have 700-ish shows on this guitar, and I have beat the living crap out of it. But the story behind what guitar this actually is, it's a modification of a D18, kind of. So they ran this weird custom series, it's like called a Series D, Series something like that, or another, I have no idea. But Ovanko Wood, they stopped making these guitars after a while, and I have no idea why because it's favorite wood to play. It took so long to set in, but it sounds so good and it feels so good on your fingers. And you know, it, it took, it took a lot, I'll tell you that much. This guitar I didn't play for about 2 years cuz I couldn't stand how the tone was and there was no low end. And now it's all low end and it's beautiful. But what's interesting about this guitar is that it really started to set in after a couple floods. So I got caught in, uh, this whole watermark down here is not the camera, that's all watermarks from this guitar being submerged. Underwater from like here down. So like up to the pickguard, this thing was underwater, which was crazy. And then I stuck it in a case and I was stupid and it was damp and it was kind of a mess. But this thing is really pretty. It's fallen apart because I've put so much love into this thing, but this thing has fallen off of stages from great heights. It has been dropped. It has been thrown. It has been trapped in floods. And throughout it all, it just sounds beautiful. But this is my Martin. If you see me play live, this is the guitar I'm probably playing.
