Martin Simpson Guitars & Gear: British Folk and Americana Guitar Complete Rig Guide
Martin Simpson guitars gear — Santa Cruz acoustic and resonator deep-dive for the British folk and Americana guitarist's transatlantic synthesis approach.
Martin Simpson, Costa del Folk, Benalmadena, 17 March 2015.
Martin Simpson guitars gear is an examination of a guitarist who represents both British folk guitar’s ongoing living tradition and a genuinely transatlantic musical identity — the equipment and approach of a guitarist whose career has spanned British folk’s acoustic fingerstyle tradition and significant periods living and working in the United States, engaging with American roots traditions including blues, old-time, and Americana, producing a synthesised musical identity that places Simpson in an interesting intermediate position: deeply rooted in British folk’s specific traditional repertoire and fingerstyle vocabulary while also genuinely informed by American acoustic guitar traditions .
His specific position — an active, continuing performing and recording artist (in contrast to Jones’ career interruption) whose ongoing presence in the tradition connects the Jones-generation British folk guitar influence to the present, while his American experience adds a transatlantic dimension that neither Jones nor Simon Nicol’s careers incorporated — gives this article an opportunity to examine both what “living tradition in the present” looks like relative to “influence through canonical recordings’ persistence”, and what transatlantic musical synthesis looks like within British folk’s specific acoustic context.
Background
Martin Simpson was born on May 5, 1953, in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, England, with his early musical development including deep engagement with British folk music and the acoustic guitar techniques of the specific British folk guitar tradition represented by guitarists like Nic Jones — guitarists this article’s opening positions Jones as specifically preceding Simpson within this tradition’s lineage.
His early career development in Britain — releasing recordings within British folk’s acoustic tradition from the 1970s onward, developing the fingerstyle technique, alternate tunings, and repertoire engagement that characterise his approach — placed him within the lineage represented by Nic Jones, with Simpson representing both a continuation of that tradition and his own specific individual development within it.
His significant period living and working in the United States — primarily during the 1980s and 1990s, though this article doesn’t have precise dates for all aspects of his American years — brought him into direct contact with American roots music traditions including blues (particularly Piedmont and Delta blues traditions that overlap with acoustic guitar’s traditional territory), old-time music, and the broader American Americana/roots landscape. This American experience contributed to what became a genuinely transatlantic musical identity: not abandoning British folk’s foundations but adding American roots-music perspectives to these foundations, with the resulting synthesis becoming part of Simpson’s specific individual musical voice.
His return to active British presence — and his continuing active career through subsequent decades, recording and performing substantially into the present — represents exactly the “ongoing active participant in a living tradition” contrast with Jones’ “influence through canonical recordings’ persistence”.
Martin Simpson Guitars Gear: The Complete Rig
Guitars
Martin Simpson has a significant and widely-noted association with Santa Cruz Guitar Company instruments — a Northern California-based manufacturer (founded in 1976) known for producing high-quality acoustic guitars that many players and critics consider among contemporary acoustic guitar manufacturing’s finest, comparable to Collings (discussed in the previous Simon Nicol article) as another “contemporary quality tier” manufacturer whose instruments represent genuine alternatives to vintage instruments for demanding professional use. Santa Cruz has developed a specific reputation within acoustic fingerstyle guitar communities particularly, with certain models well-regarded for fingerstyle playing’s specific requirements (balanced response across all strings, sufficient sustain for melodic single-note lines, appropriate volume and projection without overwhelming the relatively intimate dynamics of fingerstyle playing).
Simpson’s work extensively incorporates open and alternate tunings — DADGAD and various other configurations that open harmonic possibilities particularly suited to the folk and roots material that forms his primary repertoire. Simpson’s American experience potentially added additional tuning approaches from American roots traditions (certain open tunings more specifically associated with American blues and old-time contexts, such as Open G or Open D, alongside DADGAD’s more specifically British folk association) to his vocabulary, representing a potential area where transatlantic synthesis appears at the level of technical approach rather than only at the level of repertoire.
Simpson’s American roots-music engagement includes blues material that, like Kelly Joe Phelps’ work, connects naturally to resonator guitar’s specific tonal character — the metallic brightness and sustain that suit blues slide traditions specifically. Unlike Phelps, who uses resonators exclusively in lap-style, Simpson likely incorporates resonator instruments within a broader multi-instrument approach, using them for specific repertoire material where their tonal character suits the music rather than as his primary instrument across all material.
Amps
For contemporary professional folk/acoustic performing contexts — which may range from intimate folk-club performances through larger concert halls and festival stages — appropriate acoustic amplification preserving the acoustic instruments’ natural characters represents Simpson’s foundational amplification approach, with specific systems varying by venue and context.
Effects
Consistent with acoustic folk and roots-music aesthetics generally, minimal effects processing characterises Simpson’s approach, letting acoustic instruments’ natural characters and playing technique represent the primary sonic content.
Playing Style & Tone Philosophy
Martin Simpson represents “transatlantic synthesis within British folk’s acoustic tradition” as a specific artistic achievement — distinct from both purely British folk approaches (Jones’ exclusive focus on British traditional material within British folk’s specific performance contexts) and from the American acoustic traditions (Rawlings’ Americana duo partnership, Phelps’ lap-style slide within American roots contexts, Kottke’s American fingerstyle eclecticism). Simpson’s specific position — British folk as foundational, American roots as genuinely added dimension rather than replacement — represents a synthesis that makes him a genuinely distinct case from any of these guitarists.
The technical vocabulary that Simpson brings to this synthesis draws from multiple sources: the British folk fingerstyle tradition’s accumulated craft knowledge (tunings, voicings, ballad arrangement approaches, dance-tune rhythmic sensibility, all discussed in the previous Jones article) combined with techniques associated with American roots guitar traditions (slide approaches, blues-derived vocabulary, old-time rhythmic feels). This multi-tradition technical fluency — not merely imitating either British or American traditional approaches but developing genuine competency within both, then using this dual competency as a base for original musical work that draws on both — represents a specifically developed skill set that distinguishes Simpson from guitarists who work primarily within a single tradition, even when that single tradition’s depth is considerable.
The Santa Cruz guitar association connects directly to the “contemporary quality tier” acoustic instrument discussion the previous Nicol article introduced via Collings: both Santa Cruz and Collings represent manufacturers whose instruments are valued for all-dimension quality (tonal, construction, stability, intonation) suited to demanding professional use across varied performance contexts. For Simpson’s specifically varied performance demands — playing British folk material, American blues, original compositions synthesising both, and whatever else a transatlantic career spanning multiple genres requires — an instrument of consistent high quality across varied playing styles and contexts (rather than optimised specifically for any single approach) represents a practical necessity rather than merely a tonal preference, making an instrument like Santa Cruz’s well-regarded acoustic models a specifically appropriate choice for his broad-ranging musical requirements.
Tonally, Martin Simpson guitars gear philosophy was built on Santa Cruz acoustic guitars (with resonator instruments for blues-associated material) in open/alternate tunings, through minimal amplification in varied acoustic performance contexts — equipment serving a transatlantic British-folk-and-American-roots synthesis approach that draws on multiple acoustic guitar traditions’ specific technical vocabularies, with the Santa Cruz instrument’s all-dimension quality providing consistent performance across the varied playing styles and contexts this synthesis requires.
The Santa Cruz Guitar Company’s reputation within fingerstyle acoustic guitar communities specifically — beyond this article’s general “contemporary quality tier” characterisation — deserves brief examination regarding what specifically distinguishes instruments favoured by fingerstyle players from instruments that might equally suit strumming/picking contexts. Fingerstyle playing typically involves lower overall volume per string than heavy strumming (since individual string plucking rather than full-chord strumming produces less per-string attack energy), combined with requirements for distinct individual note separation (each of the multiple simultaneous voices — bass melody, inner harmonies, treble melody — in complex fingerstyle arrangements needing to be audible as distinct rather than blurring together) and for relatively even response across all six strings (since fingerstyle compositions may give melodic importance to any string, including bass strings that are sometimes neglected in instruments optimised primarily for strumming). These fingerstyle-specific requirements — relatively balanced string-to-string response, clear individual note separation rather than blended overall loudness, sufficient sustain for single-note melodic lines without overwhelming the harmonic content simultaneously present — differ somewhat from what makes an excellent strumming instrument (where overall volume, projection, and the blend of multiple strings into a single chordal sound might matter more than per-string balance and individual note clarity). Manufacturers who have developed strong fingerstyle reputations, like Santa Cruz, have typically done so by optimising their instruments’ construction characteristics (top wood selection, bracing patterns, body shape/volume, and various other construction details) toward these fingerstyle-specific requirements, explaining why fingerstyle-focused players gravitate toward specific manufacturers and specific models within those manufacturers’ ranges rather than simply choosing “the best acoustic guitar” without regard to playing-style-specific requirements. This playing-style-specific instrument evaluation connects back to this series’ broader “context-dependent equipment rightness” theme (the Rawlings small-archtop discussion being perhaps the clearest prior instance) — no instrument is universally “best,” but specific instruments are specifically well-suited to specific playing contexts and requirements.
The teaching dimension of Simpson’s ongoing tradition-participation — briefly noted in this article’s playing-style section — represents a broader phenomenon across British folk guitar’s contemporary landscape that this article can briefly examine. British folk guitar’s acoustic tradition, like various other music traditions, has developed its own teaching and transmission infrastructure: workshops (intensive short-format learning events at folk festivals and dedicated teaching retreats), one-to-one lessons, master classes, and various other formats through which practitioners share accumulated technical knowledge with developing musicians. For Simpson specifically, his involvement in this teaching infrastructure (whatever its specific forms — this article doesn’t have detailed confirmed information about Simpson’s specific teaching activities beyond noting teaching as one dimension of his multi-faceted career) represents participation in the “personal instruction” transmission mechanism that complements the “canonical recordings as reference points” mechanism the Jones article discussed. This personal-instruction transmission mechanism carries specific kinds of knowledge that recordings alone don’t convey: physical technique details (how the fretting hand approaches the neck, how the picking hand generates specific tonal qualities, how the body positions relative to the instrument for specific physical demands of fingerstyle playing) that need to be demonstrated in person rather than merely inferred from recordings; real-time feedback on a developing musician’s specific technical challenges; and the kind of mentorship relationships that shape a developing musician’s overall musical values and orientation, not just their specific technical skills. Both transmission mechanisms matter for a tradition’s ongoing vitality; both recordings and direct instruction represent genuine vehicles for the knowledge accumulated over a tradition’s history to flow forward into its future practitioners.
How to Sound Like Martin Simpson
Guitar Approach
A Santa Cruz acoustic guitar (or comparable contemporary high-quality flat-top acoustic from another manufacturer within this quality tier — Collings, Goodall, Bourgeois, or similar) represents the foundational Martin Simpson guitars gear instrument for most material, with resonator guitar for blues-specific material.
The stylistic approach: develop genuine dual-tradition competency — British folk’s specific fingerstyle vocabulary (DADGAD, other alternate tunings, ballad arrangement, dance-tune rhythmic sensibility, as discussed in the Jones article) alongside American roots-music approaches (blues slide and fingerstyle vocabulary, old-time rhythmic feels, American-associated open tunings like Open G and Open D). This dual-competency development requires genuine engagement with both traditions at depth rather than superficial familiarity with either — and requires the kind of years-long sustained engagement that Simpson’s American period (multiple years living and working within American roots music communities) exemplifies, rather than the kind of passing stylistic borrowing that doesn’t produce genuine fluency in the borrowed tradition’s actual approach.
Amp Approach
High-quality acoustic amplification appropriate to venue/context, preserving the Santa Cruz instrument’s natural character across varied performance settings from intimate folk clubs through larger festival stages.
| Element | Approach | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Primary acoustic guitar | Santa Cruz or comparable quality tier | All-dimension quality for varied demands |
| Resonator guitar | For blues-associated material | Distinct from primary instrument, contextually deployed |
| Tunings | DADGAD, open G/D, varied alternate tunings | Transatlantic tuning vocabulary (British + American) |
| Amplification | Acoustic system, context-appropriate | Folk club through festival scale |
| Core skill | Genuine dual-tradition competency | British folk + American roots at depth, not surface |
| Living tradition role | Ongoing active participant | Contrasts with Jones’ influence-through-recordings pattern |
Santa Cruz acoustic (plus resonator for blues material) in transatlantic tuning vocabulary through acoustic amplification. The defining elements are genuine dual-tradition technical competency (British folk and American roots).
Influence & Legacy
Martin Simpson’s influence operates through both his recordings (available for subsequent musicians to encounter as Jones’ recordings are available) and his ongoing active performing/recording/teaching presence in British folk’s living tradition — combining both influence mechanisms in a way that neither Jones (primarily recordings-based influence for the post-accident period) nor a purely contemporary-performer-without-canonical-recordings comparison would quite represent.
His broader significance — demonstrating that British folk’s acoustic tradition can absorb and be enriched by genuine engagement with other specific musical traditions (American roots music) without losing its foundational character — represents a model for how folk traditions can remain vital in the present: open to genuine influence from other traditions while maintaining the specific accumulated knowledge (tunings, repertoire, fingerstyle vocabulary) that constitutes each tradition’s distinct identity.
The comparison with Nic Jones — whose own British folk guitar work, documented in the previous article, represents the tradition within which Simpson developed his early approach — provides the direct lineage connection: Simpson as a next-generation practitioner who studied Jones’ recordings and developed his own approach partly in relation to this influence, demonstrating the “canonical recordings as ongoing reference points” mechanism the previous article described from the receiving end (how subsequent musicians are shaped by canonical recordings) rather than from the producing end (how Jones’ recordings became canonical). The parallel with Dave Rawlings — whose own Americana/acoustic context, examined earlier in this series, represents American roots music’s acoustic guitar tradition from a different specific angle — provides a transatlantic comparison within this series’ developing acoustic landscape: Rawlings as an American working within American Americana tradition, Simpson as a British guitarist who engaged genuinely with American roots traditions from a British folk foundation, both representing specific relationships between acoustic guitar practice and American roots traditions but from genuinely different starting points. And the connection to Pierre Bensusan — whose own DADGAD-extended approach, examined earlier in this series, represents yet another specific relationship to alternate tunings and acoustic fingerstyle within a non-British non-American specific musical context — extends this series’ developing “same technical tools (DADGAD, alternate tunings, fingerstyle), genuinely different specific applications across different tradition-contexts” comparison across multiple articles’ perspectives.
Frequently Asked Questions: Martin Simpson Guitars & Gear
What guitar does Martin Simpson play?
Martin Simpson is notably associated with Santa Cruz Guitar Company acoustic instruments — Northern California-made high-quality flat-top acoustics considered among contemporary acoustic guitar manufacturing’s finest. He also uses resonator guitars for blues-associated material within his transatlantic repertoire.
What is Santa Cruz Guitar Company?
Santa Cruz Guitar Company is a Northern California-based acoustic guitar manufacturer founded in 1976, known for producing high-quality acoustic instruments particularly respected within fingerstyle guitar communities. Their instruments are valued for all-dimension quality (tonal character, construction quality, intonation accuracy, long-term stability) that suits demanding professional use.
What tunings does Martin Simpson use?
Simpson’s work incorporates DADGAD (shared with his British folk tradition lineage, as discussed in the Nic Jones article) alongside American roots-associated open tunings including Open G and Open D, representing a transatlantic tuning vocabulary that reflects his dual British-folk-and-American-roots musical identity. His American experience potentially added American-associated tuning approaches to the British-folk-associated DADGAD that would have been more central to his earliest development.
How does Martin Simpson’s career compare to Nic Jones’?
Jones’ most significant recorded output preceded a career interruption (1982 accident) after which his influence operated substantially through those canonical recordings’ persistence rather than through ongoing active performance. Simpson represents the “ongoing active participant in a living tradition” pattern — continuously recording, performing, and teaching across recent decades, representing the tradition in the present rather than primarily through historical recordings, and adding to the tradition rather than only preserving what earlier practitioners established.
What is the significance of Simpson’s American period?
Simpson spent significant time in the United States — primarily during the 1980s and 1990s — engaging directly with American roots music traditions including blues, old-time, and broader Americana contexts. This American experience contributed to a genuinely transatlantic musical identity: not replacing his British folk foundations but adding American roots perspectives that, combined with his foundational British folk training, produced the synthesised approach that distinguishes his musical identity from purely British-folk-centred guitarists like Jones.
What does “living tradition” mean in the context of British folk guitar?
A living tradition is one that continues to be actively practiced, developed, and transmitted in the present — not merely preserved as historical record. For British folk guitar, “living tradition” requires active practitioners like Simpson who record new work, perform regularly, teach, and engage with the tradition in ways that keep it responsive to present contexts rather than treating it as museum-piece preservation of historical practices. Recordings alone (like Jones’ influence mechanism for the post-accident period) preserve the past; active practice keeps the tradition alive and capable of growth.
How does Simpson’s transatlantic synthesis relate to the “service to repertoire” orientation discussed for Nic Jones?
The “service to repertoire” orientation (examined in the Jones article) applies within individual traditions — serving each specific piece of traditional material’s own requirements. Simpson’s transatlantic synthesis operates at a higher level: not merely serving individual pieces within one tradition but developing genuine competency within two traditions (British folk, American roots) sufficient to serve pieces from both traditions appropriately, and to create original work that draws on both traditions’ accumulated wisdom without misrepresenting either. Both orientations share a common structure: letting the music’s requirements guide the guitarist’s choices, rather than letting individual technical display determine what music gets played or how.
The specific American traditions Simpson engaged with during his US period — blues (Piedmont and Delta specifically noted in this article’s background section), old-time, and the broader Americana landscape — represent genuinely different specific traditions whose acoustic guitar vocabulary differs from one another as well as from British folk. Piedmont blues features a specific fingerpicking style associated with guitarists from the Southeastern United States, with a characteristic interplay between thumb-driven bass-string patterns and treble-string melodic/rhythmic work that represents its own accumulated technique vocabulary. Delta blues typically features rawer, slide-oriented approaches and specific bottleneck-slide vocabularies (connecting to the slide discussions this series pursued in the Kelly Joe Phelps article, though Delta blues slide typically involves upright playing rather than Phelps’ lap-style). Old-time music — the pre-blues, pre-jazz American roots tradition associated with fiddle tunes and string-band music of the Southern US — features yet another specific guitar vocabulary, where guitar typically functions as a rhythmic/harmonic “backup” to fiddle melody (similar in structural role to the rhythm-guitar-as-foundation function discussed in the Simon Nicol article for Fairport’s arrangements, though with quite different specific technique). Each of these American traditions thus represents its own specific accumulated guitar vocabulary, meaning Simpson’s American period involved genuine multiple-tradition engagement rather than engagement with “American music” as a single undifferentiated category — further deepening the “deep dual-competency” argument this article has made for why his transatlantic synthesis represents genuine creative achievement rather than surface-level borrowing.
In summary, Martin Simpson guitars gear represents Santa Cruz acoustic guitar (with resonator for blues material) in a transatlantic tuning vocabulary (DADGAD plus American-roots-associated open tunings) through context-appropriate acoustic amplification — equipment serving a British-folk-plus-American-roots synthesis approach developed through genuine deep engagement with both traditions, representing both a continuation of the Jones-generation British folk guitar lineage and an extension of that lineage beyond its original British-traditional boundaries through sustained transatlantic musical encounter. For guitarists and listeners interested in what British folk guitar’s tradition looks like in its actively-continuing present moment, Simpson’s ongoing career represents the essential current reference.
For listeners wanting to engage with Simpson’s transatlantic synthesis directly, comparing recordings across his British-folk-centred work (traditional material, DADGAD-arranged ballads, dance tunes) and his American-roots-influenced work (blues, old-time, Americana-inflected originals) provides the most direct route to hearing how the synthesis actually sounds in practice — not as a theoretical position but as a specific musical reality, where British folk’s harmonic and melodic character meets American roots music’s rhythmic feel and slide-associated vocabulary in specific recorded moments that demonstrate what this kind of deep-dual-competency synthesis actually produces when realised in sound.
Image credits
- Martin Simpson: Bryan Ledgard, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
- Top image: “Martin Simpson, Costa del Folk, Benalmadena 2015”: Martin Simpson playing an acoustic guitar on 17 March 2015. Photo: Bryan Ledgard, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Copyright: Bryan Ledgard. Full original frame retained; proportionally resized for display. No crop or retouch by GuitarGangsters.
- Martin Simpson: photo by Tim Packer, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Martin Simpson live: Bryan Ledgard, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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