Achieving “Knighthood”
In 1976, a young Parker tried to get an
apprenticeship in Jimmy D’Aquisto’s shop.
He took the first archtop he’d made to
show D’Aquisto that he was serious. He was
turned down, but D’Aquisto clearly saw
something magical in the
instrument Parker had made.
“He said, ‘This is the best first
guitar I ever saw,’ and on my way out
the door he said, ‘You’re crazy if you stop
building guitars.’ I walked out of there
going, ‘I guess I’m a guitar maker.’ He
knighted me—he knighted me in his
shop in 1976.”
Thus began the obsession. “This is what
I think about before I go to bed, what I
think about in the shower. I’ve worked on
thousands and thousands of guitars. I’ve
seen all the good stuff and all the funny
stuff, and I’m trying to make my contribution
to the field and make a better guitar.”
One of Parker’s innovations is his bridge.
“The majority of the response from any
acoustic guitar comes from the top—not
only the two pieces of wood that normally
make the top, but also the braces and the
bridge. For reasons I don’t understand, most
people don’t think of the bridge as a transverse
brace. But that is exactly what it is.
On the classical and flattop, it’s bonded to
the top, and on an archtop it’s forced down
against the top. It’s well known that the
material in the bridge, the size and weight
of the bridge, and the configuration of the
bridge impact the sound of the instrument.
And not only is the bridge a transverse
brace, it’s also a
transducer that changes
vibrational energy into sound energy by
delivering the vibrations to the top. It’s a
key part of the signal path from the strings
to the top. So why are we taking this holy
piece of material, cutting it in half, and putting
a couple of hokey pieces of 6-32 brass
rods and adjusters in there? It never made
any sense to me.”
Parker makes most of his bridges out
of ebony. They start out at 120 grams, but
he hollows them until to 21–24 grams. “It
would blow off a bench in a little breeze. It
is no thicker than an eighth of an inch, and
many places are much thinner than that.
That’s partly what contributes to the low
end of the dynamic range. You haven’t got
a lot of mass to accelerate, so you tickle the
string and it’s very happy to light up and
make a sound.”
Since these miniscule bridges cannot be
adjusted to change the action, Parker decided
to make action height adjustable by the
player, on the fly. The neck literally floats
over the guitar’s top—the only thing touching
the body, aside from the bridge and tailpiece,
is a carbon-fiber neck pin that extends
into a thin-walled receptacle of aluminum
tubing bonded inside the neck block. On the
back of the guitar is a small, round grommet
through which a hex wrench can be used to
move the neck up for ridiculously low action
or down to, say, play slide.
