Martin 000X2E Brazilian Rosewood X Series Auditorium Acoustic-Electric Guitar

The Martin 000X2E Brazilian Rosewood X Series auditorium acoustic-electric is the Martin you take everywhere without flinching. Its back, sides and headplate are Brazilian Rosewood HPL — Martin's high-pressure laminate, pressed with a Brazilian rosewood pattern — which means dark, dramatic looks paired with a body that barely notices humidity, heat or the back of a hot car. A spruce top, scalloped X bracing and Martin's E-1 electronics with an onboard chromatic tuner do the musical work, and it ships in a waterproof softshell case with backpack straps.

What Brazilian Rosewood HPL actually is

Let us be straight about it, because the name invites confusion: the back, sides and headplate are high-pressure laminate carrying a Brazilian rosewood pattern, not rosewood timber. That is a feature of this guitar rather than a caveat. HPL is dimensionally stable, so it does not shrink, swell, crack or develop finish checking when the air goes from air-conditioned dry to Queensland-summer humid, and it is genuinely tough — the reason X Series guitars survive touring, share houses, festivals and years of being handed around. Visually it is striking, with the deep chocolate grain pattern you would expect from the name, and there are no CITES restrictions hanging over it when you travel.

Spruce top with 5/16-inch scalloped bracing

The top is spruce under a hand-rubbed satin finish, braced with a scalloped spruce X pattern at a 5/16-inch brace size. Martin lists the top simply as spruce and does not publish a construction designation for it, so we are not going to invent one — what we can tell you is how it behaves. It has real snap on the attack, holds together when you strum hard, and because the HPL back and sides reflect rather than absorb, the guitar throws sound forward in a way that cuts through a noisy room.

000 auditorium body, 24.9-inch scale

The 000-14 fret auditorium shape is the shape a lot of players end up at: narrower at the waist than a dreadnought, comfortable seated for hours, and even enough across the strings that fingerpicking and flatpicking both work without a fight. Paired with the 24.9-inch scale, string tension stays moderate, so chord shapes take less grip and bends give more easily than on a long-scale guitar. It is a full-size instrument that just happens to be an easy one to hold.

Martin E-1 electronics with a built-in chromatic tuner

Martin's E-1 system is fitted from the factory and gives you volume, tone and phase controls plus a built-in chromatic tuner, so you can arrive at a gig with nothing but a cable and still tune between songs without unplugging or clipping anything to the headstock. The phase control is the useful one nobody mentions: it lets you kill the low-end feedback howl that turns up when you are standing in front of a monitor. Straight into a PA, an acoustic amp or an interface, it behaves predictably.

Select hardwood neck and board, PLEK-finished frets

The neck is select hardwood in Martin's PA Profile with the High-Performance Taper — 1 3/4 inches at the nut, 2 1/8 inches across the board at the twelfth fret — with a hand-rubbed finish that stays quick under the thumb. The fingerboard and Sloped Modern Belly bridge are select hardwood too, with a white TUSQ saddle cut to a 16-inch radius, 2 5/32-inch string spacing and a white Corian nut. Twenty frets, a mortise and tenon neck joint at the fourteenth, and Martin's PLEK process levelling the frets and cutting the nut slots to measured tolerances before it ships.

Appointments and hardware

There is no binding to interrupt the lines of the body — the finish is satin front and back, with a single abalone-pattern ring at the soundhole and Style 28 abalone-pattern markers along the fingerboard. Satin chrome closed-gear tuners with small buttons sit on the Brazilian Rosewood HPL headplate under the script ink logo, and there is a faux tortoise pickguard, white side dots and a black Boltaron heelcap. A left-handed version of this model exists if you need one.

Softshell case and Lifespan 2.0 strings included

It comes in a Martin softshell case rather than a sleeve: waterproof shell, internal padding, backpack straps, so it goes on public transport, a bike or a plane without you needing to buy anything else first. Factory strings are Authentic Acoustic Lifespan 2.0 Phosphor Bronze Lights, treated to hold their brightness against sweat and humid air far longer than untreated bronze. Between the HPL body and those strings, this is about as low-maintenance as a real Martin gets.

Set up in-store by Guitar World Australia's techs before it ships to you, so it plays perfectly the moment it arrives.