Many songwriters believe guitars contain songs, and their job is to retrieve them. If that’s the case, this 2007 Takamine GS330S is packed full—as evidenced by the signatures of 92 artists who’ve found songs inside.
This dreadnought, a now-discontinued model with a solid cedar top, is the original Acoustic Guitar Project guitar. The brainchild of mega music fan and advertising creative Dave Adams, the Acoustic Guitar Project challenges songwriters to write and record a song in one week on a specific guitar. Adams started the project in 2012 in New York City with this Korean-made Takamine, purchased on Craigslist, and ultimately expanded to 55 cities around the world, each with its own project guitar. (Full disclosure: I’m the volunteer curator of the project in Syracuse, New York.) To date, the project has inspired more than 1,200 songs, all of which can be heard on the project website.
The first project songwriter on the NYC guitar, whose signature can be seen over the rosette, was Brandon Wilde. He’d been through the music-biz wringer with the band Thisway, picked up by a major label in the late ’90s and then abruptly dropped. Adams was blown away by Wilde’s talent but frustrated with his slow pace of production. “He could write a song in an hour, but then he would spend too long producing it,” Adams says. From that observation came the idea to foster creative work by imposing restrictions: one guitar, one week, and one song, captured in an unedited live take with only a portable recorder.
While the New York project guitar has some recognizable names (e.g., Adam Levy, Jean Rohe, Doug Wamble, Gary Lucas), collecting well-known artists has never been the point.
“In my opinion, one of the most important parts of life is to create something from nothing,” Adams says. “So it doesn’t really matter who’s wielding it. Every single person is creative, because they have their own set of experiences and only they can write a song from that perspective. This project is a creation machine. All that matters is an artist realizing, ‘I can finish one. I can finish another one.’ I just want to be a creative spark.”
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.
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