Why Play an Archtop Guitar?

Why would you want to learn to play the archtop guitar? Because you love the sound, because you love the feel of the guitar, maybe your hero in your favorite band is the lead archtop guitar player. Whatever your reasons, you have decided to learn and are looking for a quick route to stardom.
Contrary to popular belief, learning to play the archtop guitar is relatively easy. Like anything in life you need to be shown the basics and then it is just a case of practice makes perfect.
Although some people are naturally talented when it comes to musical instruments I have yet to see a student who picks up an archtop guitar and immediately blasts out a classic. To play guitar to a good level takes a lot of dedication and practice.
Although all this dedication and practice sounds like hard work it really isn't, if you have decided to go this far the chances are that you will actually enjoy the endless twanging that is needed to become competent.
Where to start?
Your starting point is your equipment. We always recommend you start with an electric archtop guitar. They are far more forgiving and easier to play than an acoustic. At the very least you will need a guitar and an amp.
You have your archtop guitar, your amp and a plectrum and you are ready to begin. First you need to tune your archtop guitar. There are various methods to do this ranging from simply tuning by ear to some ridiculously complex methods. By far the easiest way is to use a guitar tuner. These are cheaply available on the internet or from your local music store and are really easy to use. There are even apps for most smart phones as well as web sites that have guitar tuners.
There really is no excuse for not tuning and it is essential that you your archtop guitar is tuned, if you can't get hold of a tuner for some reason just pop into your local musical instrument store and they will be happy to tune it for you.
Guitar Chords
Chords are the basis of the guitar sound. Whenever you hear a big chorus in a song, these are chords. Chords are generated by playing 2 or more notes at a time. This sounds difficult but it just entails holding down 2 or more strings at a time whilst strumming the guitar. You should start with the C chord as this is the easiest to play and can be used endlessly. You play the C chord as follows:
• Index finger just behind the first fret on the second string (B).
• Middle finger, just behind the 2nd fret on the forth string (D).
• Ring finger behind the third fret on the 5th string (A).
• The first and third string are played open, whereas the 6th string is not played at all.
There are many more chords to practice and practice makes perfect. Practice swapping between chords as this is where most people fall down and can make the difference between sounding mediocre and sounding great.
Practice makes perfect but the right equipment can help tremendously!

To get in touch with archtop guitar luthier, visit Fine Archtops at www.FineArchtops.com.

Archtop Guitar History

In 1894, Orville set up shop as O.H. Gibson, Manufacturer, Musical Instruments. Surviving examples of his workmanship—early mandolins, archtop guitars, harp guitars and such curious experimental designs as a lyre-mandolin and harp-zither—are ornate and exquisitely detailed. Now as it so happens, Kalamazoo was the epicenter of the American furniture industry, and in a whimsical fluke of destiny—like some odd confluence of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Ford—five local businessmen decided to ground Orville Gibson’s baroque visions in the great American entrepreneurial tradition of capitalization and modern production techniques—they hoped to propagate an entire new generation of American string players. They realized that there were more efficient ways to compartmentalize the individual steps and streamline the construction of Gibson’s fretted-string designs—although handcraftsmanship remained a fundamental component.
Thus in the fall of 1902, Orville entered into an agreement with these Kalamazoo businessmen to establish the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company, Limited. In exchange for a lump sum of $2,500 and a series of monthly payments, Orville Gibson authorized the new company to make use of his name, transferred his original 1898 patent for an archtop mandolin and undertook a two-year program of tutelage. The company subsequently expanded on Orville’s best ideas while dispensing with his idiosyncrasies. Yet ultimately it was the achievements of these early Kalamazoo craftsmen and their descendants that perpetuated the Gibson name, even as the company’s marketing mavens conveyed Orville’s mystic sense of superiority with the born-again fervor of a missionary. It was the golden age of string bands.
In various incarnations, the Style O remained Gibson’s top-of-the-line model into the early ’20s, when in 1919 the brilliant composer, acoustical engineer and string player Lloyd Loar was hired to head up the Gibson design team. And though Loar didn’t actually build any archtop guitars, like a great editor or conductor, he harmonized the collective talents of his designers and archtop luthiers into a consonant whole, leading to the development of a celebrated family of Mastertone instruments (bearing his personal signature of quality): these included the famous Mastertone banjo series, the F-5 mandolin, the H-5 mandola, the K-5 mando-cello and in 1924, the trendsetting L-5—America’s first f-hole archtop guitar.
The L-5 consolidated all of the Loar team’s patented breakthroughs for fretted-string instruments for the first time in one guitar. With the invention of the truss rod in 1922 by Orville’s old crony Ted McHugh, the old triangular style necks could be streamlined and the playing action slackened. And the L-5’s elevated fingerboard, height-adjustable bridge, floating tailpiece and elevated pickguard allowed the top to resonate as freely as possible. This original L-5 had a three-piece neck, a small 16-inch body (of spruce and birch, then maple), and a 24-inch scale length (to further reduce string tension and soften the action). Popularized by Italian émigré Salvatore Massaro (better known as Eddie Lang), the archtop orchestral guitar became the preeminent rhythm and solo voice in the earliest days of recorded jazz, and its dominance as a rhythm instrument in the swing era spawned a new generation of enhanced models, beginning in 1934, when the L-5’s own body dimensions were expanded to 17 inches and its scale-length increased to its present 25 inches: the classic noncutaway design Gibson recently honored with a Custom Shop reissue.
Its pervasive influence was subsequently reflected in the work of gifted archtop luthiers such as Epi Stathopoulo, Elmer Stromberg and John D’Angelico, who expanded on the ideas of Orville Gibson and Lloyd Loar with important refinements of their own. As a result, in one form or another, Orville Gibson’s vision of an archtop guitar has endured for over a century. Even today, despite the practicality of solid-body electric icons like the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson Les Paul, semiacoustics (such as the original Gibson ES-335 and the new Paul Reed Smith Archtop Guitar and Hollowbody designs) and electric-acoustics crafted entirely from pressed laminates (such as the venerable Gibson ES-175), guitarists remain enamored with the rich sonority, depth of tone and acoustic intimacy of a handcarved archtop guitar. Thus 21st century luthiers find themselves happily occupied with adventurous custom orders from jazzmen and intrepid hobbyists, inspired to experiment with new combinations of materials and construction methods—because while the modern player hungers for something timeless, inevitably, as the music moves forward, they’re drawn to explore something new.
To get in touch with archtop guitar luthier, visit Fine Archtops at www.FineArchtops.com.

Custom Archtops in the Making

Born in 1856, Gibson was an obsessive, eccentric genius in the great American poetic tradition of Stephen Crane, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. He worked around Kalamazoo, Mich., in a number of odd jobs, but his skills as an archtop luthier and woodworker were such that he tried his hand at building musical instruments. His contempt for other instrument makers was immense, as was his belief in himself and his conviction that the sonority and projection of arched tops, backs and rims carved from solid pieces of unstressed tone woods was inherently superior to that of instruments formed from flat sheets and bent strips of tone wood.
In effect, Gibson adapted European violin-making techniques to the construction of mandolins and custom archtop guitars—where the top acted, the back reacted and the chamber resonated. “I don’t necessarily see one as having an advantage over another,” opines Seattle luthier Steve Andersen, whose archtop guitar and flattop designs have been championed by the likes of Bill Frisell and cartoonist-collector Gary Larson. “I started out building a traditional flattop, and in the last 10-12 years I really focused on the custom archtops. To me they’re both very valid instruments.”
“What the archtop guitar does best is make the sound of each string very clear, punchy, powerful and focused,” explains Stephen Grimes, a master luthier operating out of Hawaii who has built custom archtop guitars for George Benson, and is currently collaborating with the jazz guitar legend on new signature models for Ibanez. “The flattop guitar is a very full sounding guitar without a whole lot of projection. If you were to stand 100 feet away and listen to them both, you’d hear the distinct notes of each string on the archtop guitar, whereas the flattop would be little more than mush.”
By today’s standards, Orville’s original instruments, such as the classic Style O archtop guitar, were built like tanks. Orville experimented with different styles of internal bracing, various tone woods and huge hollow necks, trying to enhance the overall sonority and resonance of his instruments until each note could be plainly heard. Ultimately he selected spruce for the top because it was light, malleable and lively—it transmitted vibrations directly across the grain. He used maple for the back and rims because it was hard, dense and stable—it could reflect and sustain tone. Starting with a thick quarter-sawn board, Gibson would sketch a silhouette of the instrument, saw away excess wood, scallop out the insides and shave down the outsides to form a flexible arched diaphragm, graduating the tops and backs by shaving and sanding, tapping the wood as he went along, until he’d achieved the optimum shape, thickness, sonority and sensitivity.
To get in touch with archtop guitar luthier, visit Fine Archtops at www.FineArchtops.com.

The Evolution of Archtop Guitars

When Chip Stern first brought his Johnny Smith Gibson to luthier James L. “Jimmy” D’Aquisto’s Farmingdale, Long Island, workshop in 1973 for a fret job, it was the beginning of a lifetime friendship that cemented my fascination with the archtop guitar, an instrument indelibly fixed in the collective consciousness due to the big band craze of the 1930s, and its role as the instrument of choice amongst jazz guitarists from Charlie Christian on up.

Like many youngsters, my first encounters with archtop guitars took place while trudging my way through the Mel Bay Method for a succession of teachers with bad complexions and big Italian cheesecake guitars, generally the Excel or New Yorker models crafted by the Lower East Side luthier John D’Angelico—D’Aquisto’s mentor. Plucking away on my $35 Danelectro hollow-body electric (a harmonious marriage of prime Formica and Masonite), I was in awe of these larger-than-life instruments, with their warm, penetrating sound—bejeweled as they were with ornate abalone and mother-of-pearl inlays, gold-plated fittings and elegant cream bindings. Following the elder D’Angelico’s death, Jimmy D’Aquisto was defined by that tradition and extended it—a source of both great pride and frustration for this bold, gifted artisan.

“He was torn between that world, and what he thought was right,” according to friend John Monteleone, a master archtop luthier from Long Island with a formidable reputation among players and collectors. “It must have consumed him, because he was a passionate, imaginative fellow, who really had the creative juices flowing. You see, when you begin to wrestle with these materials, you get used to dealing with it according to your experience. So people like Jimmy and I used to think about things a lot from a player’s point of view, and that gives you ideas, and when you have ideas, you tend to want to try them out. Some things may not turn out to be all that good; it’s just as valuable to learn what is wrong as what is right.”

To this end, D’Aquisto was always pushing the envelope. In the mid-’60s he began routing out acoustic tone chambers from solid pieces of maple, then sealed them with a carved spruce top for an instrument that looked and felt like a solid body, but sounded like an amplified acoustic archtop. And by the end of his life, with the Solo, Avant Garde and Centura models, D’Aquisto zeroed in on a more personal sound, feel and aesthetic, replacing those obtrusive plastic pickguards with a sleek ebony finger-rest, experimenting with height-adjustable ebony tailpieces and larger bridges in an attempt to fine-tune the down tension of the instrument’s top and voice through external adjustments. “Instruments back then were not designed to be played the way that you’re playing today,” said D’Aquisto. “They were designed for a specific style of playing. I know. I was there making ’em. An archtop guitar was made to have a penetration and a cutting power that would project. It’s the king of guitars, and there’s no limit to the number of ways you can voice a custom archtop guitar. But while the music’s changed, we’re still employing technologies of the ’30s.”

Veteran luthier Robert Benedetto, whose custom archtop guitars are employed by virtuosos like Jimmy Bruno and Jack Wilkins, the tried and true remains relevant. “The so-called ’30s technology really hasn’t changed,” he asserts. “Those fundamentals still work, and I have yet to see anything, from any makers, myself included, that constitutes a meaningful improvement. I guess that makes me the doubting Thomas of luthiers, and sure, there have been a lot of refinements: the tops and backs are being graduated and more finely tuned now than they were in the past, resulting in a guitar that should mature to have a better voice as it is aged. But I don’t see any radical changes in jazz or playing styles or the instruments themselves.”

Clearly, archtop luthiers differ as to whether the archtop guitar is best regarded as a finished painting or a blank canvas upon which to depict fresh tonal colors. “If you give everyone the same ingredients and recipe to make this guitar, they’re all going to come out different,” concludes Monteleone, bespeaking the enduring originality of this instrument, which like the country that bred it, is equal parts Yankee ingenuity and old-world artistry, dating back to the post-Civil War vision of Orville Gibson.

To get in touch with archtop guitar luthier, visit Fine Archtops at www.FineArchtops.com.

Archtop Guitar Building

Trying to build that perfect archtop guitar? Here are some pictures to inspire you:

(From BarkingDogGuitars.com)

(From JoeDragonny.com)

(From Guitarrez.com)

To get in touch with archtop guitar luthier, visit Fine Archtops at www.FineArchtops.com. 

Custom Archtop Artistry

Archtop guitars fall into two groups: acoustic and electric. Acoustic archtop guitars are sometimes amplified with a floating pick-up, and electric archtop guitars have pickups set into the body.

Traditionally, great archtop guitars are built around a top and back that are carved, inside and out, into thin arched surfaces, which produce exceptional volume and tone. This process takes a lot of time by a highly-skilled craftsperson. Needless to say, these great archtop luthiers don’t come cheap. It is not a coincidence that these Rolls-Royces & Bentleys of the archtop guitar world cost more than Chevrolet & Fords of the archtop guitar world.

It is time for the jazz guitar education community to acknowledge the profound influence of guitarists on modern jazz, and to embrace the universal popularity of this instrument.

Most of the custom archtop luthiers in the world of higher jazz education know that the guitar is like the disenfranchised, problem child of the jazz guitar program. There is but one chair in the big band of vocal jazz group for a guitarist. He or she “chonks” away at the chords and battles with the keyboard player for comping duties, or dukes it out with 15 horn players for solo space. Small wonder archtop guitar players often prefer to return to the garage with jam buddies for after-school sessions, with no support, guidance or interference from anyone except mom and pop, who reluctantly contributed the garage space.

There is a short of music and playing situations in schools for archtop guitarists, where the music directors are seldom guitarists themselves. To make matters worse, the archtop guitarists are likely to be interested in genres that the music director is unfamiliar with, and not have the inclination to coach classes that don’t come with a “custom built archtop” repertoire for that instrument.

Today, archtop guitars are largely built by specialized luthiers. If you're looking for a custom archtop guitar, visit Fine Archtops at www.FineArchtops.com.

The Quest for Acoustic Sound

For the last 60 years, therefore, the archtop jazz guitar has been amplified, with either one or two pick-ups installed, the latter typemaking for a more versatile instrument. Be that as it may, one of the clear object that is good acoustically. But to produce a top-quality acoustic archtop is the sternest test of any luthier, experienced or otherwise. Having been to the workshops of highly regarded builders such as Ribbecke, Benedetto, Campellone Grimes and Monteleone, I know that everyone of these luthiers is deeply absorbed in making archtops of the highest caliber, acoustically speaking. Benedetto’s 25^th Anniversary Model, Monteleone’s exquisite “Radio City” model, Campellone’s “Special”, Grimes’ “35^th Anniversary Limited Edition” and Ribbecke’s “25^th Anniversary Edition” all come without pick-ups (though one can be added if desired). One only has to consult books like “The Acoustic Guitar” by N. Freeth and Charles Alexander, or “The Blue Guitar” by Ken Vose to reveal the extent to which luthiers are committed to producing beautiful acoustic instruments.

Yet the unassailable fact remains that the vast majority of jazz guitars are supplied with pick-ups. Some luthier builders employ one floating pick-up; others have one or two builtin. The key point here is that market conditions determine the nature of guitar, both its shape and looks, as well as its individual appointments.
Looking for an archtop guitar luthier? Fine Archtops hosts a directory of guitar makers who can make your dream custom archtop. Find the list at www.FineArchtops.com

Acoustic Archtop Guitar

The archtop guitar is largely synonymous with jazz in the context of public performance, in a small group line-up. In pre-amplification days fine archtops were somewhat large in body size and parallel (or near parallel) braced. In rhythm playing in the big bands this formula gave the archtop guitar a cutting edge and the big sound guitar players wanted. When instruments were fitted with pick-ups and amps, it was given to players to put the jazz guitar on the musical map as a solo instrument. Not only was the archtop guitar now able to hold its own in the big bands as a solo instrument, it was only a matter of time when the fine archtop guitar would fit in with diverse musical configurations. But whether in solo performance or in the midst of bands, the archtop guitar needed amplification if it was to be heard in the public forum.

If you're looking for a custom archtop guitar, visit Fine Archtops at www.FineArchtops.com.

Making an Archtop Guitar

When you’re trying to make an archtop guitar, keep the following in mind:

• Read Robert Benedetto’s “Making an Archtop Guitar,” which is the leading authority for building custom archtop guitars.
• Don’t let the implementation of arched plates set you back. Perform the need intermediate steps and don’t skip over anything!
• Look online for videos of archtop guitar building to see if any inspire you.

Trying to find an archtop guitar luthier? Then contact Fine Archtops at www.FineArchtops.com.