Traveling Musician's Delight: Martin & Co.'s Backpacker Guitar

You love to play guitar. You love to travel. You couldn’t imagine going more than one week without picking up your guitar and laying down a few licks. You also cringe at the thought of lugging it around with you while you are backpacking through…well…wherever it is that you go. You are exasperated; torn by two loves, desperately searching for a solution to your dilemma. My friend, I was once in your shoes. Then I found the Martin & Co. Backpacker guitar.

The Backpacker guitar is a wonderful invention that allows intrepid and adventurous guitar players to forget their weight woes and bring their instrument along for the journey. Its shape is something of an oddity, to be sure, leading many laypersons to mistake it for a mandolin (although it looks nothing like a mandolin) or some other type of folk instrument. This odd shape is such that the Backpacker guitar is quite difficult to play unless you use the strap. The benefits, however, are a good-sounding guitar that weighs a mere two pounds (that’s correct, two pounds), is only about 3 feet long, and looks really cool.

Ok, but is the Backpacker versatile, you ask? Can the little guitar handle the rigors of a backpacking musician’s lifestyle? Absolutely, I say, as long as you exercise a bit of common sense when toting your Backpacker guitar around. The padded case that comes with the Backpacker guitar is entirely adequate to protect it from minor bumps and bruises; indeed, my own Backpacker has been from Jasper, Canada to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, and has suffered only minor road wounds. The long black bag, on many occasions, actually seemed to make my crowd-navigation a bit easier as I traveled through South America. I didn’t understand why until finally a brave soul came up and asked: “So you’re going hunting, huh?”

Two travel companions: my pack and my Backpacker guitar. Both accompanied me from the northern alpine beauty of Jasper, Canada, to the far southern islands of Tierra del Fuego.

Credit: Chris Register

Copyright: Chris Register