The journey of an idea III

An old friend of mine, and an amazing picker, Jose Guillen, had seen the experimental flat top guitar and said " This would make a great archtop!" I dismissed the idea as this was all about making a guitar with a perfectly flat top - Jose clearly missed the point.

Some months later another chap came round to talk about me building an archtop guitar for him - not what I normally do but I do love jazz guitar and this feller loved my set ups and just liked my work. We talked about what we could do but I knew I had little interest in building a conventional jazz archtop. It's all been done before and there are many good makers out there experimenting with with arching and thicknessing, with soundhole placement and that's what I've been doing for years with steel stingers...no, making another traditional jazzer didn't really do it for me, so the commission didn't happen.

But then for some reason I got the failed experimental flat top guitar out of the cupboard.

If you ask many jazz players about the sound they would like they often mention that they want more sustain and less feedback. I got thinking about how to achieve this by applying this "long neck" idea to an archtop guitar. The arched soundboard is self supporting so Nial Cain's suggestion about having a floating bridge could now work. The full length neck would give us the sustain and the lightly made acoustic body would add some broader tonal qualities. Seemed my old pal Jose had been right after all!

So...back to the workshop.

The experimental archtop guitar was built in 2009/2010, it looked amazing, payed effortlessly and sounded great. But then I'm a little biased. Would anyone else feel the same?

I took the guitar to amazing jazz musician Frank Vignola for an opinion, and he was very helpful. Wow! It was great to hear the guitar played by such an amazing player, and it was good to listen to it compared to his own fine guitar, I have to say I was not disappointed with how my instrument performed. Not too shabby at all... I took in what Frank had to say and got thinking about how to make a few changes. This led to my current version...