Kurt Cobain’s Martin D-18E: The world’s most expensive guitar
Where would we be without the humble guitar? In addition to providing generations of men with a suitable mid-life-crisis purchase, the six-stringed instrument has also birthed the sounds of everything from folk music to blistering rock and roll. The advent of rock and roll, in particular, helped to cement the guitar’s position among the coolest and most accessible instruments a person can play. You don’t need grand piano money to play the guitar, but having a disposable income will certainly help when the axe collection inevitably starts to expand.
Without much difficulty, you can pick up a starter guitar, be it electric or acoustic, for around £50 or less, or maybe less if you’re willing to scour the depths of Facebook Marketplace. These cheap instruments often provide a good gateway into the musical landscape, but players often begin to yearn for something a little more specialist once they have landed upon their unique musical style, aims, and budget.
Each guitar is different, and some are better suited to certain styles of music than others, hence why you see established rockstars changing guitars after each and every song during live shows. Another reason for those changeovers results from a deep-rooted desire in the hearts of every rock star, to amass as many cool guitars as possible, in an attempt to emulate that one scene from This Is Spinal Tap. So, say you had an unlimited budget and an unshakable desire to amass the greatest guitar collection in the world, what would you buy?
You could walk into any local guitar shop and walk away with something pretty special for anywhere between £2,000 and £20,000; there is no real limit to how much you can spend on one production guitar. Once you get into the world of custom, signature, and special edition guitars, that price tag might double or even triple. Then there are built-to-order guitars, and companies like Martin, whose acoustic guitars are closer to works of art than instruments – their new D-300 acoustic has a pricetag of $300,000 (£221,500) at the time of writing.
When guitars get silly is when you add significance to one particular instrument. For instance, you could pick up a black Fender Stratocaster for well-under £2,000 with ease, but a black Strat played by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour throughout the Dark Side of the Moon era sold at auction in 2019 for just under £3million.
Being played by a guitarist as important and influential as Gilmour inevitably causes the price tag of a guitar to skyrocket, in the same way that an artwork becomes more expensive if the artist becomes more notable.
So, what is the most expensive guitar in the world?
In terms of production guitars, the aforementioned Martin D-300 acoustic might be your best bet in terms of spending as much money as possible. However, once you expand your search to include culturally significant guitars which have sold at auction, the world’s most expensive guitar is a Martin D-18E acoustic, owned by Nirvana songwriter Kurt Cobain and used most famously for the band’s MTV Unplugged performance.
Cobain’s guitars have always fetched a pretty penny at auction, with the blue Fender Mustang featured in the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ music video fetching just over $4.5 million at an auction in New York in 2022. His D-18E managed to trump that price tag, selling for a whopping $6 million at auction in 2020. That sale price makes the D-18E – which, without the significance of Kurt Cobain, might have sold for £5,000 – the most expensive guitar in the world to date.
