Add THIS Puppy To Your Wish List

A while back I posted some info about Gibson's so-called Robot Guitar. Well, I recently found something thank makes the Robot Guitar look like something you could win playing skee-ball down at Chuck E. Cheese's. Behold Martin's D-100 Deluxe:

Impressed by the pictures? Well, it gets better. The body of this guitar is made of Brazilian Rosewood. For those of you who don't know, the harvesting and trade of Brazilian Rosewood was banned by CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) in the early 1990's. Consequently, both the price and desirability of this excellent tonewood skyrocketed in the following years. Legally, you can only make an instrument out of Brazilian Rosewood if the wood was harvested prior to the CITES-imposed ban date. Since the ban, many guitar players had to settle for the almost-as-good but more-affordable East Indian Rosewood. My Martin D 16-R is made of East Indian Rosewood, and I love it.

A word about the term "tonewood": You can get different sounds from an instrument depending on the type of wood you use to build it. For example, violins are traditionally made of spruce and maple. The spruce is used for the front or "soundboard," and maple is what gives the back of a violin that cool, undulating shine. Over time, luthiers found that spruce in particular provided the clear, delicate tone that violinists sought. Guitar builders went though similar steps to discover wood varieties that yielded specific tones. For more info about tonewoods for acoustic guitars, click here.

Back to the D-100 Deluxe. As you can see in the top pictures, the wood itself (the guitar back in particular) is inlaid with semi-precious materials like mother of pearl, tourmaline and abalone. The tuning machines and bridge pins are made of solid 14-Karat gold, and perhaps the most mind-blowing of all, the nut (the part that holds the strings just below the head of the guitar) is made of fossilized mastadon ivory. That's right...elephant-like animals in the Pliocene epoch of the Cenozoic period proudly gave their tusks for the production of these guitars! I wonder if PETA has anything to say about using animal products that are 4 million years old... anyway, we're getting sidetracked again.

So what would a little six-string like this cost? $1000? $5000? $10,000? Nope. You'd have to have some blackmail-worthy material on the president of Martin Guitars to get a price like that. To take this beut home, you'll probably have to take out a second mortgage on your house. Seriously. The listed price on Martin's website is $109,999.00. Makes the $3,500 price tag for Gibson's Robot Guitar seem a lot more reasonable, huh? To get up close and personal with the D-100 Deluxe, click here. Then get back to reality. This guitar isn't for people like us.