The detail that stopped me on this one isn't a spec. It's a price tag.
Bonamassa's 1937 Martin 00-18 — the shade-top this whole announcement is built around — came to him through John Shults at True Vintage Guitar, who found it in Ohio with the original owners' family. It still had its original price tag on it. Forty-five dollars.
I've been appraising instruments for a living for most of my adult life, and I want to be precise about what that number means, because "it cost $45 in 1937" is the kind of line that gets tossed around for color. Forty-five dollars in 1937 was real money — call it three or four weeks of wages for a working man. Somebody made a decision to buy that guitar. Then it sat in a family long enough that the tag survived, which almost never happens, because the first thing anybody does with a new guitar is throw the tag away.
That's the instrument Martin just spent two SKUs trying to reproduce. Announced today, both available now.
What's Actually in the Two Boxes
Martin 00-18 Joe Bonamassa — $3,999.99, built in Nazareth, Pennsylvania
- Body: 00, solid spruce top, genuine mahogany back and sides
- Bracing: Golden Era scalloped X-bracing
- Neck: Golden Era Modified Low Oval, standard taper
- Fingerboard: ebony, old-style 18 inlays
- Binding: faux tortoise
- Finish: custom 1937-style sunburst, with replicated top wear copied from Bonamassa's original
- Case: hardshell, included
- Electronics: none
Martin 00-10E Retro Joe Bonamassa — $1,299.99, built in Navojoa, Mexico
- Body: 00, solid spruce top, solid sapele back and sides
- Bracing: scalloped spruce X-bracing
- Neck: Performing Artist, high-performance taper
- Finish: 1937 Joe Bonamassa Sunburst, same replicated wear
- Electronics: Martin E1 — Volume, Tone, Phase, built-in chromatic tuner
- Case: softshell, included
This is the second Martin collaboration with Bonamassa. His line on it: "If you told me when I was a kid that I'd be sitting here in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, with not one, but two signature guitars, I'd be like, 'You're out of your mind.'"
Why a 1937 00-18 Is the Guitar It Is
Two spec choices carry this instrument, and both of them get glossed over in the press coverage.
First: it's mahogany, not rosewood. The 18 designation is Martin's mahogany-body line, and mahogany does something rosewood specifically does not. Rosewood gives you scooped mids, a late-blooming low end, and overtones that hang. Mahogany gives you the opposite — a fast, dry, midrange-forward voice with a quick decay and far less overtone wash. It's the wood you want when the guitar has to sit in a track next to a vocal, or when you're the only thing accompanying yourself. It doesn't sound expensive under a microphone the way rosewood does. It sounds clear, which is a different and often more useful thing.
Second: it's a 00, not a dreadnought. Martin's 00 is a small, waisted body with a fraction of the air volume of a D-size box. You lose the low-end shove. What you get back is note separation, a punchier midrange, and a guitar that doesn't get muddy when you fingerpick hard. This is the body shape that made pre-war Martins the standard for solo blues players, and it's not nostalgia — it's physics. Less air in the box means less low-frequency energy competing with the fundamental of the note you actually played.
Add Golden Era scalloped bracing — where the braces are carved thin in the middle so the top can move more freely — and you get the 1930s Martin recipe in full: responsive to a light touch, with a top that opens up rather than one built to survive heavy strumming.
Bonamassa's own test of the recreation is the one worth repeating, because it's a recording test, not a showroom test: "When we put the mic in front of it, my producer said, 'I like that one better.'" Better than the 1937. That's the claim, and if you've spent time around pre-war Martins you know how rarely anybody says that out loud.
Now the Part Nobody Else Will Tell You
Here's where I stop being a vintage guy for a minute.
The $3,999.99 model has no pickup. That's correct for what it is — you mic it, or you don't amplify it. The 00-10E Retro at $1,299.99 is the one that goes on a gig, and it's the one most people reading this will actually buy. So the practical question isn't which one is more faithful. It's what happens when you plug a 00-body mahogany-voiced guitar into a Helix, HX Stomp, POD Go or Quad Cortex and run it to a PA.
And the answer is that the standard acoustic-piezo EQ recipe is wrong for this guitar. Not slightly wrong. Wrong in the direction that removes the exact thing you paid for.
We ran the dreadnought version of this fix recently on the Epiphone Marcus King El Dorado, and the moves there are correct — for a dreadnought. A 00 is a different box, and three of the four steps need adjusting.
Fix One: Move the High-Pass Up, Then Leave the Low Mids Alone
The dreadnought advice is high-pass around 80–100 Hz and cut 180–250 Hz to kill boom. On a 00, that second cut is a mistake.
A smaller box has a higher main air resonance than a dreadnought — less air inside means the box resonates higher, not lower. The boom you're cutting on a dread mostly isn't there on a 00 to begin with. What is there in the 180–250 Hz region on a mahogany 00 is a chunk of the guitar's body and warmth, and if you scoop it because a YouTube video told you to, you end up with a thin, papery signal and no idea why.
Starting points for this guitar:
- Roll the high-pass up to 100–120 Hz. You're not losing anything musical below that on a 00, and you're clearing room in the PA.
- Leave 180–250 Hz flat until you've heard it in the room. If it's boxy, cut it — narrow, 2–3 dB, no more. Don't start there.
- Sweep 300–500 Hz instead. On small-body guitars this is where honk actually lives, and it's the cut most people never try because the dreadnought guides don't mention it.
Fix Two: Notch the Piezo Peak — Don't Shelve It
An under-saddle system reads string pressure at the saddle slot. It hears the strings pushing on wood, not the top flexing or the air moving inside the box, which is why every under-saddle pickup on earth has that hard upper-midrange presence and the quack on the low E and A. The full mechanism is in five frequency fixes for a bad-sounding acoustic pickup.
The usual prescription is a cut somewhere in 2–4 kHz, and that's still right. But on a mahogany 00, be surgical about it:
- Sweep with a narrow boost first to find the ugliest frequency, then flip it to a cut of 3–5 dB. Narrow Q.
- Do not use a wide bell or a shelf here. A mahogany 00's entire personality is midrange. A broad cut in that region doesn't remove the piezo artifact — it removes the guitar and leaves the artifact.
That's the difference that matters. On a rosewood dreadnought you can be sloppy in the mids because there's overtone content everywhere to cover you. On this guitar there isn't. The mids are the instrument.
Fix Three: The Phase Switch Is a Tool, Not a Novelty
The E1 gives you Volume, Tone and Phase. Most players flip the Phase switch once, hear a small difference, and never touch it again. That's a waste of the most useful control on the guitar.
Phase reverses the signal 180 degrees, which reduces low-frequency feedback and changes the bass response. It exists because an acoustic body in front of a wedge or a full-range cab is a resonant chamber with a microphone-adjacent pickup inside it, and at volume that loop wants to howl — almost always at the body's main air resonance, which on a 00 sits somewhere in the neighborhood of 100–110 Hz.
Practical order of operations on stage:
- Set the switch by ear at gig volume, not at bedroom volume. The correct position depends on the room and your position relative to the speakers, and it can flip between soundcheck and downbeat. It's not a set-and-forget spec.
- If it still feeds back, add a narrow notch filter in the modeler — not a broad EQ cut — parked on the offending frequency. A parametric block with the Q cranked tight will kill a howl while leaving the tone essentially untouched.
- Keep a soundhole cover in the case anyway. Phase and a notch will get you a long way. They will not beat a plugged soundhole in a loud band.
Fix Four: If You Add a Body IR, Add the Right One
The one thing EQ genuinely cannot do is put the body back, because the pickup never heard it. That's what a body IR is for — and the trap is grabbing a generic "acoustic IR" that turns out to be a rosewood dreadnought.
Stack a dreadnought body IR on a mahogany 00 and you've built a guitar that doesn't exist: 00 fundamentals, dreadnought resonance, and a low end that fights the bass player all night. Get the body size right first, then worry about how good the capture is.
Whether an IR block is even worth spending on this signal is a real question with a real answer — acoustic IR vs. subtractive EQ covers which half of the problem each one actually solves. And if you own the 00-10E and a decent mic, capturing a body IR of your own guitar beats every commercial IR on the market for this application, because it's your box.
One more thing before the EQ: set your modeler's input impedance to the highest available value rather than Auto. A piezo is a capacitive source and it wants to see around 10 MΩ. Auto is guessing from the first block in the chain, and on this signal it guesses wrong. Details in piezo DI and input impedance.
The Appraiser's Take
Buy the 00-18 if you want the guitar. Golden Era scalloped bracing and genuine mahogany out of Nazareth at $3,999.99 is a fair number in 2026, and the replicated top wear is either charming or irritating depending on your temperament — I've sold enough relic'd instruments to know there's no talking anybody out of either position. It's a recording and living-room guitar. Mic it.
Buy the 00-10E Retro if you want the gig. Sapele instead of mahogany is a real substitution, not a cosmetic one — it's in the same family of dry, midrange-forward voices but it isn't the same wood, and anybody telling you it's indistinguishable is selling something. At $1,299.99 with electronics and a functional tuner, though, it's the honest working version of this guitar, and everything above applies to it.
And if you got here because it's Bonamassa's name on the headstock and what you actually want is the electric tone — the 2204-flavored grind that runs through most of his catalog — that lives in a different part of the rig entirely. The best Helix amp models for blues is the map for that one.
Both models are available now through authorized Martin dealers and at martinguitar.com.
