Whether you could say the same about the bass response depends on expectations.

Granted, the M-20 doesn’t have the sheen of a spruce top, but it’s at least as bright as the cedar-topped Seagulls we reviewed last month and there’s no shortage of clarity. Guild M-20 & D-20 in useĪny notion that the all-mahogany construction may subdue the treble response is quickly dispelled. All the hardware and appointments are the same as the M-20’s and it comes in a hardshell case with a built-in humidifier and the option of an LR Baggs Element pickup system. The D-20’s design dates back to 1968 and it’s an all-solid, all-mahogany dreadnought. Decoration is confined to an ABS plastic rosette ring and simple pearl dot markers to match the inlayed headstock logo. The M-20 has an all-solid but unbound mahogany body with a mortise and tenon jointed mahogany neck, and a rosewood bridge and fingerboard. Under the watchful eye of former Gibson Montana master luthier Ren Ferguson, the first production models channel the spirit of the late 1960s, with the concert-sized M-20 joined by the D-20 dreadnought also on review here. Having acquired the Guild brand, the Cordoba Music Group opened a new manufacturing facility in Oxnard, California and shipped the old factory equipment west on flatbed trucks. In 2014, Fender closed the plant to sell off the company. Over the following years, Guild production shifted to Tacoma, Washington and then to New Hartford, Connecticut.

Production then moved to California, where the workers assembled and finished Westerly-made ‘kits’. Guild made the first ones in 1967, having recently opened a factory in Westerly, Rhode Island, and Guild carried on making guitars there until Fender bought the company in 1995. Poor Nick’s M-20 must have been fairly new. We guitar reviewers are often last to know exactly what we’re getting, but when a diminutive case was pulled from its shipping box this Nick Drake enthusiast was thrilled to behold a fabled Bryter Layter-style M-20, seen here in Vintage Sunburst, but also available in Natural, just like the guitar that Drake posed with on the cover of his second long-player. The editor’s email arrived, saying a couple of Guilds were on their way.

D standard notes on the guitar neck