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Brave New World

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The rise of the nylon-string archtop guitar
Teja Gerken

Acoustic Guitar March 2001

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Alan Carruth's experience building a wide range of instruments (including classical, steel-string, and archtop guitars as well as violins) has given him a solid understanding of how individual designs function. The Massachusetts-based luthier's curiosity led him to experiment with the nylon string archtop concept a few years ago. "Classical player's complain of not being heard", he expalins, "and for various reasons, it's not really possible to amplify the classical guitar well." As a result, Carruth began looking into ways to increase the instrument's volume. "You're not going to get anywhere unless you can increase the efficiency of the guitar," he says. "There are structural reasons why that's difficult on a standard classical guitar, and it looked like it might be plausible to try an archtop."

Combining a classical sound with a jazz guitar feel is another reason luthiers have tried this hybrid. New York City’s Stephen Marchione developed his design after a request by studio and smooth-jazz guitarist Joel Kipnis (aka JK). Marchione, who just finished his third nylon-string archtop, feels that the instruments fill an important niche. “He [JK] wanted a nylon-string that felt like his archtops, especially in his left hand,” Marchione explains. “He had been using a Contreras flamenco guitar with a really narrow neck, so I copied the dimensions of that guitar.” The guitar Marchione came up with is based on his standard 17-inch model but with a shallower depth. 

Pat Metheny’s original brand of contemporary jazz has often called for unusual guitars, and he has frequently turned to Canadian luthier Linda Manzer to realize his musical visions. Already the proud owner of several standard Manzer guitars as well as the 42-string Pikasso sitar-guitar and a tiple, Metheny asked Manzer to build him a fretless nylon-string. Although he didn’t have a design for the guitar in mind, Metheny explained to Manzer that he wanted a guitar that could emulate late jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius’ sound. “He didn’t specify archtop,” says Manzer. “It was my choice. I decided to make it an arch-top rather than a flattop because I wanted more control over the power of the instrument. You can play with an arch-top’s tone colors more once it’s finished, with adjustments to the bridge, tail-piece, and height of the strings off the top. I’d never built anything like this, so I wanted to keep as many options open as possible.”

Finnish luthier Markku Henneken also built his first prototype nylon-string archtop for a customer, a player who was looking for a different sound to play in a variety of genres. Henneken’s innovative instruments feature offset sound-holes, unusual shapes, and bright colors, and his willingness to experiment and take chances served him well in this new endeavor.

Hawaii’s Steve Grimes is known for both his traditional archtops and more experimental instruments like doublesoundhole guitars and a guitar with a stress-free top that he collaborated on with designer Ned Steinberger. So it was a natural for Grimes to build a nylon-string archtop for rocker Steve Miller, who had been wondering about the qualities of such an instrument for some time.

Bob Benedetto had been thinking about fusing his archtop designs with nylon strings for more than 20 years and finally found the time to act on his ideas in 1994 when he built what would be christened II Fiorentino. Benedetto had worked on a D’Angelico archtop that had been converted for use with nylon strings, which in his words, “didn’t really work out.” So he knew that it wasn’t enough to simply adapt an existing design. Benedetto sees Il Fiorentino as “an interesting conglomeration of classical guitar, archtop guitar, and violin.”

All the luthiers I talked to agreed that light construction is the key to making the nylon-string archtop work. Carruth’s first instrument features a carved spruce top and padauk back and sides. To compensate for the lower tension of nylon strings, the guitar’s top measures only about 3.5 mm. at its thickest point, and it is supported with a very light X-brace. Grimes echoes the need for light construction and also feels that it is necessary to start from scratch rather than simply modifying an existing design. “A 17-inch or even a 16-inch guitar has too much of a soundboard to be activated by nylon strings,” he says, “so I made it OM-size. Also, I didn’t think that the X-brace would work well, so I used five fan braces fitted to the underside of the top. It’s braced like a classical guitar.” Grimes used curly maple for the back and sides and a cedar top, which he carved to about 3 mm. under the bridge. “I had about 85 pounds of tension in mind rather than 150,” he explains. “I wanted to make a very lightweight top.” Although Manzer relied on an X-brace pattern for Metheny’s guitar (“for more sustain”), like Grimes she used a carved cedar top to reduce the weight. “Cedar also responds very easily and takes almost no time to open up,” she says.

Henneken and Marchione, on the other hand, have achieved good results by adapting and modifying their respective steel-string archtop designs for nylon strings. Henneken’s guitar is constructed more lightly than his steel-string archtop and sports a slotted headstock. “The top and back are both ten to 20 percent thinner,” he says, “depending on the overall stiffness and quality of the wood.” The eye-catching guitar also features a curvaceous non-cutaway shape. Although Marchione built his nylon-string archtop guitar lighter than his regular archtops, he wanted the guitar to be strong enough to withstand the tension of steel if a guitarist decided to restring it that way. As a result, he included an adjustable truss rod in the neck, and he chose to use lightweight woods rather than thinning the woods he usually works with and thus compromising the solidity of the guitar's construction. "I was really concerned about weight," he says. "I had some old big-leaf maple that was about half the weight of normal eastern red maple that I would use for an [ordinary] archtop. I used an equally light piece of Engelmann spruce [for the top], as I didn't want to thin the woods too much." As he does on most of his archtops, Marchione used a bracing pattern based on the Amati bar of an Italian cello pattern. "There's a formula for it," he says, explaining how he arrived at the dimensions for the guitar's braces. "When you lay out a violin, you take the width of the upper bout and lower bout and you make a division by a seventh. It's really a much straighter bar than most parallel bracing on guitars. I took the Italian bass-bar pattern and mirrored it on both sides." To adjust the pattern for the lower tension of nylon strings, he shaved the bars until he achieved the kind of flexibility of the top—using thumb-pressure—that he felt was right. He also points out that the feet of the guitar's bridge line up with the bars inside the body. 

The influence of the bowed stringed instrument family (which also inspired steel-string archtop guitars) was clearly visible on several of these guitars. Carruth's guitar features an arch that is more closely related to a violin than to the curve employed by most archtop guitar makers. Benedetto's Il Fiorentino has friction pegs instead of tuning machines as well as a tailpiece that is tied to the endpin with cello gut. "I wanted it to be as acoustically pure as possible," explains Benedetto. "It really was a true refinement of archtop construction. Nylon strings don't have the power to drive the top like steel strings do, so I had to build the entire instrument much more delicately. Using my basic understanding of archtop construction, I made a thinner top, thinner back, and lightweight braces, and I varied the bracing configuration." Benedetto also feels that a lightweight bridge is best suited to this type of instrument and used a delicate maple design. Carruth, on the other hand, found that his initial bridge-which at about 30 grams weighed only slightly more than a standard classical bridge -as too light. He added a new bridge that was twice as heavy and increased the guitar's volume.

Although the number of nylon-string archtops produced is still very small, the general consensus is that they've been successful. With three completed instruments and two more in the works at the time of this writing, Henneken probably has the most experience with this new style, yet he's still experimenting. For the prototype, his customer, Francisco Costa Reis, requested flamed maple back, sides, and neck and a spruce top, and Henneken followed that up with an instrument that had mahogany back and sides and a cedar neck, which he feels are superior choices for this application. He is also experimenting with body depth and scale length, and on one instrument he tried his own "K-bracing" pattern (roughly resembling the letter K, with two struts on the treble side of the top), but he feels that it made less of a difference than it does on his steel-string guitars.

Encouraged by the results of his first attempt, Carruth built a second instrument, this time using a redwood top and walnut back and sides, but he feels that the initial guitar had superior tone and now thinks that a heavier top might result in a better sound. "If it was a little heavier, there would be a flywheel effect," he speculates. "It would store energy at a lower amplitude and allow you to push it a little harder." Carruth plans to eventually replace the guitar's top and revoice the instrument more to his liking.

Grimes' experiments resulted in a very handsome instrument. While its modified f-holes give it a traditional arch-top appearance, it also borrows from the look of Spanish guitars by featuring a slotted headstock. "The other thing," adds Grimes, "is that it has 12 frets to the body, which changes the length of the tailpiece and where the bridge and the f-holes go." Grimes has also begun experimenting with an X-braced nylon-string archtop and a steel-string 12-fret cutaway archtop, and the nylon-string is now part of his standard line.

Although he's hardly known for building nylon-string guitars, Benedetto says, "I couldn't keep the classical construction out of my head while I was working on it." His distinctive nylon-string archtop features a noncutaway maple body with two delicate, floral-shaped openings in the upper bout rather than traditional f-holes or a single center soundhole.

In contrast, Manzer's instrument could easily pass, to the casual observer, for a standard classical guitar. She used rosewood back and sides, a round soundhole, and a wide bridge design, in addition to a Spanish-style cedar top. The first clue that something is amiss comes from the trapeze tailpiece. In contrast to his fellow luthiers' excitement about future plans, Marchione feels that he hit the nail on the head with his first effort. As a result, his two successive guitars are exact copies of the first. He is also pleased with the sound of the custom-made EMG piezo pickup he installed in the bridge of the guitar, and he thinks that the nylon-string archtop will definitely become a permanent addition to his line.

As with anything new, much is left to be learned about these instruments, but the sound of the guitars is already speaking for itself. Grimes says that he didn't hear from Steve Miller for several weeks after delivering the instrument. "I usually hear back from him right away after he gets a new guitar, but this time there was nothing," he recalls. "So I finally called him up to see what he thought." As it turned out, Miller initially considered the instrument a failure but didn't want to disappoint Grimes with the news. Grimes offered to return Miller's money and expected the guitar to be returned to him within days. Months later, however, Miller called to say that he changed his mind and was playing the new-fangled guitar all the time.

Henneken describes the sound of his nylon-string archtops as "having the softness of nylon, the mellowness of a jazz guitar, and something reminiscent of the Django-style guitar." He thinks it would best suit a guitarist whose playing is as unique as the instrument. "It's more for those who are trying to find a new, nontraditional way of doing their own thing—players who already mix all sorts of stuff, from Latin style to Gypsy jazz, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if some day someone would create their own genre with this kind of instrument." Manzer agrees. "An instrument like this usually allows musical doors to open, so the player has to work with the sound. That often inspires new pieces, which is the great joy of this work. It's very exciting for the player and the builder." Of course Pat Metheny is well known for unusual sounds, and he used Manzer's fretless nylon-string archtop as the foundation of the title track on his Imaginary Day CD. Given the success of the initial instrument, Metheny ordered a 12-string version with Fishman electronics, which can be heard on his recent Trio Live CD. 

Carruth thinks that the two prototypes he's built have a lot to offer jazz players, and he's hopeful that as he develops the concept it will also appeal to classical guitarists. "I took it to the GAL [Guild of American Luthiers] convention," he says, "and in the listening test, it seemed to me—and to several people that I spoke with—that it did carry better than most of the classical guitars. But it doesn't have that Segovia sound. Eventually, I'd like to be able to build a guitar that has an acceptable sound for the classical repertoire but that would carry a little better and allow classical guitarists to play bigger halls."

Benedetto has spent the majority of his career building guitars for jazz artists, and he thinks that the nylon-string archtop would be best suited for this application. "I don't think many classical players would go for it, if only because they're so entrenched in the traditional instrument," he says. Benedetto is convinced, however, that there is more to Il Fiorentino's sound than the strings it's strung with. "The end result is truly a voice all its own," he says. "It really does not sound like an archtop, nor does it sound like a classical. I think if I put steel strings on it, which I haven't done, I would not hear the traditional archtop guitar. I'm sure of it." Benedetto is hoping to experiment with different woods as he finds time to build more of these unusual instruments and is looking forward to further tweaking their sound.

Marchione feels that this breed of instrument definitely has appealing qualities. "It's loud," he says, "but here's the thing: It sounds like a nylon-string archtop. I have two great nylon-strings at home, and it doesn't sound like them, but it offers other advantages. The playability of the guitar is tremendous, because the neck is so straight, and you have access to 22 frets. Fingerstyle or with a pick, it plays really well. Would you use it for classical music in a concert setting? No. Why? That's what Spanish guitars are for. But it suited JK perfectly."

JK, who's used the guitar on a number of jingles and live performances as well as on his new duo record with Mark Whitfield, Soul Conversation, agrees. "It's very, very rich and warm, but at the same time, it's a little different—it has a tighter sound," he says. "For soloing, the harmonics are a lot more controlled than a regular nylon-string." He also enjoys the audience's reaction to the guitar. "It's usually on songs when I'm taking
extended solos," he says. "When people hear it, they kind of freak out, because they don't expect a guitar that looks like a regular archtop jazz guitar to be a nylon-string instrument. It's like having a nylon-string on steroids." 

Whether for the sake of experimentation or to meet players' needs, we'll surely see more nylon-string archtops being built in the future. This new breed of guitars is helping luthiers discover aspects of guitar construction that will influence other models in their lines and push the envelope even further. And the instruments are inspiring musicians to create sounds they wouldn't have found with traditional guitars and thus leading directly to previously unexplored musical horizons. Full speed ahead!