Ken Parker’s Fig model features a
Sitka spruce top, Big Leaf maple
(on the back, sides,
and neck),
ebony bridge and pickguard, and an
anodized aluminum tailpiece.
Though most players know Ken Parker
because of the innovative guitar he
and Larry Fishman designed and introduced
under the Parker Guitars brand in
1993—the Fly—he has been obsessed with
archtops for decades. Given the Fly’s striking
ergonomics, composite-covered body,
carbon-fiber fretboard, and proprietary,
multifunction tremolo—all of which made
it one of the most unique and successful
new solidbody designs of the last 20
years—it should come as no surprise that
Parker’s obsession is now advancing the art
and science of archtop guitars. But that
shouldn’t overshadow the fact that he does
it all because he’s striving to inject the playing
experience with real joy: “To me, if a
guitar isn’t fun to play—if it doesn’t put a
grin on your face and beckon you from the
corner of the room—what is it for?”
Though Ken Parker still uses the same headstock
shape found on the Parker Fly, the simiarlities
to his current archtop designs end there,
and he no longer has a stake in Parker Guitars. |
To provide insight for this article, Parker
sent a guitar for us to spend some time
with and get the hands-on Parker archtop
experience. The first touch is extraordinary.
It’s featherlight and incredibly comfortable
to hold. The neck is smooth, wide, easy to
play, and devoid of anything that might create
tension. When I played an Em chord,
there was so much . . .
everything—so much
bass, so much liveliness, so much sustain.
Everything we think the opposite of when
we think archtop. And yet, it’s all archtop.
Clockwork
Parker trained as a toolmaker for a grandfather-
clock making company before he
started building guitars. “This beautiful guy
kind of took me under his wing, because
they didn’t have somebody to do all the
tooling they needed—not the wooden
parts, the metal parts. It was like going to
grad school. I did four years worth of training
in a year and a half.”
That training and facility for machining
custom parts would play a vital role years
later. Today, Parker handbuilds almost every
piece of his archtops. “That is really a huge
ingredient of who I am now—it was an
incredible playground,” says Parker. “I was
a sponge. It was just thrilling to me. I
had dropped out of college, because I
was studying philosophy and physics
and I didn’t know what I was going
to do with that. But I sure knew
I liked to build things. I used my
brain, my imagination, my body,
my coordination, my balance, my
eyes—all that stuff. It seemed so rich
an endeavor—I just loved it.”
Parker also did serious repair work
as a guitar tech in those early years. One
of the first and most troubling things he
learned on that job was the appalling state
of fretwork on even guitars right off the
shelf. “It’s better now than it was 30
years ago. I was doing refrets on
brand-new, made-in-America
guitars that were unplayable.
I was
offended. I felt that
those companies weren’t
taking musicians and
their needs seriously,
and it really bothered
me.”
That eventually
led to the now-legendary
stainless-steel
fretwork on
the Parker Fly. “I
had done thousands
of fret jobs
by the time I started
that company. And
one of the original
design goals I told my
partner, Larry Fishman,
was “If I can’t build a guitar
that doesn’t need fretwork, I
don’t want to do it.”
Evolution of a Revolutionary
Parker got serious about playing jazz guitar
when he was 22, and he took group lessons
with a teacher named Dick Longale. One of
the most important things that happened in
those lessons was that they gave him his first
exposure to a good archtop—Longale’s Gibson
L12. “It was beautifully balanced, rich sounding,
complex . . . We were all trying to turn
the knobs on our guitars to try and sound like
Dick, but we couldn’t. So I was intrigued.”