This superb guitar comes with a bona fide mahogany back and sides, Adirondack top, tortoise binding, prewar scalloped bracing, black and white wood nitrate strip rosette, tortoise style pickguard, gloss-finished mahogany neck, 1-3/4" nut width ebony fingerboard and bridge with pearl dot markers and nickel Waverly tuners and plush lined deluxe hard shell case.
About this model, Collings Guitars says: 'OM' stands for "Orchestra Model," but 80 years after this body shape was first designed it has become the most popular 14-fret model with fingerstyle guitar soloists who choose to play on steel strings. Flatpickers (bless their hearts) also find it appealing. The compact shape makes the Collings OM equally easy to handle onstage or when sitting on the couch, or the dog, or a blanket spread out in a far-off forest, a floral fantasy featuring both flora and fauna and occasional flourishes of flamboyance. Its relatively shallow body (barely over 4 inches deep) results in balanced tone and an immediate response.
In addition to all of this grace and glory you also get a continuously wide-grained Adirondack spruce top – a material considered one of the finest tonewoods from which a guitar top can be comprised. This top is exceedingly parallel-grained; it doesn’t vary very much over its entire 15” width. The top is bordered in 4 tiny plies of black and spruce, the sides in tortoise shell celluloid. The back of the neck is more low profile than it is Veed, while it is somewhat deeper in the middle back of neck it does not have the suddenness, the fast-rise, that you feel with a V-shaped neck – it is somewhat more modern and therefore inviting. The headplate is polished ebony with the gleaming Collings script; the black ebony unbound board is bestowed with three mother of pearl dotmarkers of decreasing size, and of course there are 7 pearl dotmarkers on the bass side of the fingerboard.
Tuners are Waverly brand with butterbean buttons (the good kind). Tthe sound and playability are just fantastic. Happily, when you own a Collings OM you can be assured that you are getting a guitar with an all-mahogany neck and no “ears” on the sides of the headstock. If having a world-class Adirondack and mahogany OM is your goal this guitar will tickle your fancy (well, at least your fancy, perhaps there will be other visceral benefits):