Martin Simpson Guitars & Gear: British Folk and Americana Guitar Complete Rig Guide

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 this series’ previous Jones article examined, 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” that this article’s introduction identified as a key comparison point between these consecutive articles.

Martin Simpson Guitars Gear: The Complete Rig

Guitars

Amps

Effects

Playing Style & Tone Philosophy

Martin Simpson represents this series’ examination of “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 this series has documented from various angles (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 prior articles’ subjects.

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.

The transition this article represents from Jones’ “influence through canonical recordings’ persistence” to Simpson’s “ongoing active participant in a living tradition” raises broader questions about what folk traditions need to remain living rather than merely historical. Recording-only influence (Jones’ pattern for the period following his 1982 accident) preserves a tradition’s past achievements in accessible form; ongoing active performance and creation (Simpson’s continuing career) adds new work to the tradition, responds to changed present contexts, and maintains the kind of living relationship between tradition and present that distinguishes living traditions from museum-piece preservation. For British folk guitar specifically, practitioners like Simpson who are actively recording and performing in the present represent the mechanism by which the Jones-generation’s approaches (documented in canonical recordings that Simpson and others have studied and been influenced by) continue to inform live, present, evolving musical practice rather than becoming purely historical reference points. This “tradition requires both past documentation and present active practice” point represents a useful complement to the previous article’s “canonical recordings as ongoing reference points” framework: recordings preserve and transmit; ongoing active practice keeps the tradition alive in the present, responsive to current musical contexts and able to grow beyond what any historical recording could represent.

Simpson’s teaching activity — which this article mentions briefly as another dimension of his ongoing tradition-participation, consistent with various other guitarists this series has noted as teachers alongside their performing/recording careers — represents yet another “living tradition” maintenance mechanism: transmitting techniques, approaches, and musical wisdom to students who will subsequently carry this knowledge into their own future musical practices, a direct personal-instruction complement to the recorded-work transmission mechanism the previous article discussed for Jones’ influence.

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.

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) and the active-participant-in-living-tradition role that distinguishes Simpson’s ongoing career pattern from the canonical-recordings-as-reference-point influence pattern the previous article examined for Jones.

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

Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire — Simpson’s birthplace, per this article’s background section — represents one of this series’ more specifically English-industrial-town origins, adding genuine geographic variety to what has often been a London-area-heavy British guitarists’ origin map across this series’ coverage. Scunthorpe’s identity as a steel-manufacturing town in Lincolnshire — geographically in the East Midlands region of England, at considerable distance from London — represents a genuinely different starting point than the London-adjacent origins this series has more frequently documented for British guitarists, with whatever specific local musical environment Scunthorpe/Lincolnshire provided during Simpson’s formative years representing part of his background. Whether this regional English-industrial origin represented a direct connection to folk music (Lincolnshire has its own folk song and dance traditions, as various regions of England do) or whether Simpson’s folk engagement developed independently of specific local tradition and more through the broader folk-revival context that was active nationally during his formative years represents biographical detail this article doesn’t confirm either way. The broader point — that significant musicians emerge from genuinely varied geographic origins, including places often overshadowed by major cultural centres’ reputation-dominance in popular accounts of where music comes from — connects to this series’ recurring observation that musical significance doesn’t require cultural-centre origins, with Simpson’s Scunthorpe origins representing one of the cleaner examples of this point across this series’ coverage of British guitarists.

Considering Martin Simpson guitars gear’s place within this series’ developing landscape of transatlantic musical synthesis — a landscape this series has now documented across multiple specific cases (Jesse Cook’s rumba-flamenco-plus-jazz, examined several articles ago; Biréli Lagrène’s gypsy jazz synthesising Romani and broader jazz traditions, examined earlier in the series; Scott Henderson’s blues-jazz-fusion synthesis; and now Simpson’s British-folk-plus-American-roots synthesis) — offers an opportunity to note what these various transatlantic/cross-cultural synthesis cases share structurally despite their very different specific contents. In each case, a musician has developed genuine competency within multiple distinct traditions rather than superficial familiarity with one while merely borrowing surface elements from another; in each case, the synthesis represents genuine creative work rather than merely cultural borrowing without deep engagement; and in each case, the resulting synthesis represents something that couldn’t have been produced by someone working within either tradition alone, precisely because the synthesis draws on specific accumulated knowledge from both traditions that neither tradition alone contains. This “deep dual-competency as prerequisite for genuine synthesis” structural pattern represents a recurring finding across this series’ synthesis cases — one that distinguishes genuinely synthetic work from surface-level stylistic borrowing that doesn’t involve equivalent depth of engagement with each contributing tradition’s actual accumulated knowledge.

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.

The comparison between this series’ three most recent British-folk-adjacent articles (Thompson, Nicol, Jones, Simpson across the last four entries) and the earlier acoustic-fingerstyle articles (Rawlings, Phelps, Kottke) that immediately preceded this British folk run reveals how much territory this series has covered within the single broad category of “acoustic fingerstyle guitar” — a category that, examined closely across these seven consecutive acoustic-focused articles, reveals substantial internal diversity: small archtop versus Collings versus Santa Cruz acoustic instruments; DADGAD versus open G/D versus open C versus standard tuning; duo-partnership versus solo versus British-band-context versus American-band-context versus purely solo performance formats; primarily-vocal-accompaniment versus primarily-instrumental versus mixed vocal-and-instrumental orientations; British folk tradition versus American Americana versus British folk-rock electric synthesis versus transatlantic synthesis. Seven articles, all broadly “acoustic fingerstyle guitarist,” all genuinely distinct from each other in specific equipment, technique, and context. This internal diversity within what might superficially seem like a single instrument category represents perhaps the strongest evidence yet that this series’ approach — examining every guitarist on its list with the same depth rather than treating entire categories of guitarists as sufficiently similar to cluster together in summary treatment — produces genuine insight rather than redundant repetition: each of these seven articles has found something genuinely distinct to examine, even within a single instrumental tradition, because each specific guitarist’s specific case turns out, on close examination, to be genuinely distinct from every other.

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. This article has examined Santa Cruz’s fingerstyle-specific instrument qualities (balanced response, individual note clarity, all-dimension quality for varied demands), British folk’s transmission infrastructure (workshops, master classes, personal instruction as complements to canonical recordings’ reference-point function), the Scunthorpe origin’s geographic distinctiveness, the “deep dual-competency as synthesis prerequisite” structural pattern appearing across this series’ various synthesis cases, the internal diversity within “acoustic fingerstyle guitar” across this series’ seven consecutive articles in this general territory, and the Piedmont blues/Delta blues/old-time specifics of Simpson’s American roots engagement. 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.

A final thought connecting Simpson’s transatlantic position to this series’ broader story: this hundred-article series has itself traced something like a transatlantic journey, moving across American blues foundations, through British rock and blues adaptations, across European acoustic traditions, back to American acoustic, through British folk, and now preparing to move again to American electric rock (Tackett), then to jazz guitar history, then to Brazil, then back to rock for its closing pair — the guitar, as this series has consistently found, doesn’t stay in one place, and neither do the best guitarists, whether literally (Simpson spending years in America) or musically (every synthesis case this series has documented involving someone moving across whatever borders separate the traditions they’ve brought together). Martin Simpson guitars gear is one node in that ongoing transatlantic conversation, and this series is glad to have it properly documented.