Back in about 1987, Dakota Dave Hull walked into a music store in Minnesota and scored a 1931 National Style 1 guitar that absolutely changed his life. A shiny metal art-deco looking affair, it wasn’t anything like guitars he was familiar with. It didn’t take very long to work it into the act— Dave has been playing it ever since. In the mid-1990s he started to get to know Don Young and MacGregor Gaines of the new National Reso-phonic Guitar Company in San Luis Obispo, California. These guys were making careful reproductions of original Nationals, but with certain improvemnts in areas that hadn’t held up well to the test of time. In 1999 Dave Hull and Kari Larson became National Reso-ponic endorsers and in early 2000 they took delivery of two custom National guitars—a Style N for Kari, and for Dave, the Style 1 shown here. Dave has this to say about his new guitar: “This instrument has everything my old one has, and more. It took a little while for it to ‘break in’ but once that happened I basically stopped playing the old one. The new National beats it out in every way—sound, playability, feel, looks—everything. Every guitar player should have at least one.”