“With [that design], I got all these
other great features: incredible access to
the second octave because there is no heel,
de-mountability for repair or travel, lots of
room for a neck-end-mounted electromagnetic
pickup, and the ability to fit another
neck to the guitar for a different scale, a different
number of strings, or whatever.”
It took Parker nearly a year to perfect his
neck system. “I start with a neck core out
of my favorite stuff—beautiful-sounding,
perfectly quartersawn Douglas fir or spruce.
This one-piece core is only visible on the
side of the headstock, but it goes all the
way to the end of the neck. The back of the
neck has a hardwood veneer that matches
the sides. Between the veneer and the neck
core there’s quite a bit of carbon fiber set
in an aerospace resin that needs two hours
at 275 degrees Fahrenheit to cure. Room-temperature
resins just aren’t rigid enough
to do that job. It’s kind of challenging—you
have to make a metal mold, you have to get
the resin pretty hot, and it’s kind of tough
to control all those things and have them
all come out looking gorgeous at the end.
I can’t tell you how happy I am with the
result. It works just beautifully.”
Hold Your Head(stock) High
Parker makes every single component of his
archtops except the tuners and the strings.
For the tuners’ home—the headstock—Parker
machines a strop of aluminum that resembles
the Parker Fly’s headstock, has it anodized,
and then, unlike most archtops, positions the
tuning pegs in a row. But he doesn’t use this
arrangement for aesthetic or branding reasons.
He says there are two things that can change
the dynamic tension of a string: the angle
over the bridge and the nut, and the
after
length—the distance between the bridge
and the termination at the tailpiece, and
between the nut and the tuning peg.
The Fig flaunts its incredibly figured
Big Leaf maple. Note
the hexwrench
port for adjusting neck
height and action.
“That’s why, in one man’s opinion, a
three-and-three headstock is just plain-old
physically wrong.” Parker reasons that it
doesn’t make sense for the tension of the
high-E and the B strings to be the same as
the low-E and A strings. “I think it makes
the strings feel wrong. You have to get everything
right in order to create an extraordinary
experience for the player, and I really
try to get this balancing-the-string-tension
thing right. It’s not my idea—this is a
European idea from hundreds of years ago—but the only way to do it is to put all the
strings in one line, so the
top string is more supple
than it would be otherwise,
and there’s a nice, even
progression in tension.”
He says that arrangement
facilitates greater
customization, too. “For
example, if you primarily
play rhythm guitar, and
you don’t care so much about
bending strings, I’m going to
make you a left-handed headstock for your
guitar so you can put
huge strings on the
bottom and they won’t feel too tight—and
they’ll drive the pickup crazy.”
Parker says his headstock angle makes
the instrument feel more playable, too.
“Gibson’s is 14 degrees. Mine’s four and
a quarter. It’s as low as you can get it and
not [have the strings] come out of the nut
slots and start behaving badly. And I know,
because I’ve explored it!”